Academia is a CPU path tracer I’ve made in my free time over a period of two months.
The focus of the project was on theory. Learning the process of turning papers and research into a working product. The research topics I delved into were: Light Transport, Physically Based Rendering and Calculus.
Academia’s framework has been fully written in C++. The entire project is open-source and available on GitHub. It can be found right here: https://github.com/stefanpgd/Academia
The project duration was two months and I started October 2024.
What did I do?
- Written a path tracing rendering pipeline that focuses on accuracy using the hemispherical rendering equation
- Created a multi-threaded worker system that runs the path tracing algorithm
- Used EXRs for Global Illumination
- Created an editor that allows the user to edit both primitives and material properties
- Used Variance Reduction techniques like stratification and Russian Roulette
- Post Processing techniques: Gamma Correction, Exposure, ACES tone mapping and Gaussian Filtering
