Java Path-Tracer

A simple Java Path-tracer for rendering cool scenes written in a single java class.

The main thing I have spent my time on is adding in a glass material. It has proved to be more of a pain than I originally thought. The book series Ray Tracing in One Weekend has once again proved very useful.

Anyway, whyle developing it I would repetitively get a material that looks somewhat like glass (or some weird blob) or something that was overly noisy. at one point my glass started emitting blue and yellow light (not much of a clue why that happened. After a good few hours of hassle I finally got it refracting properly. The rest of the features (total internal reflection & reflection) were fairly straightforward after that. Even caustics (the focused light under a glass sphere) work really well.

I also found that my metal bounce rays for fuzzie metals weren’t being normalised properly causing weird ring artefacts. That was an easy fix luckily.

I think this project is coming along well. Here is a new Hi-Res test scene that I let my laptop suffer on for quite a while. for reference this is an 8th gen i5 laptop and this scene took around 15 minutes to render. I did have a fair bit of other stuff open though. Enjoy. :)