Pathtracer 15: Pause & Links

Sailing out to sea | A tale of woe is me
I forgot the name | Of where we’re heading
– Versus Them “Don’t Eat the Captain”

So! This whole series on pathtracing adventures started out without a clear goal or purpose. “I’ll just play around and see what happens” was pretty much it. Looks like I ran out of steam and will pause doing further work on it. Maybe sometime later I’ll pick it up again, who knows!

One nice thing about 2018 is that there’s a lot of interest in ray/path tracing again, and other people have been writing about various aspects of it. So here’s a collection of links I saved on the topic over past few months:

• “Efficient Incoherent Ray Traversal on GPUs Through Compressed Wide BVHs” by Henri Ylitie, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, 2017 July.
• “Caffeine path tracing demo & tutorial (WebGL)” by Rye Terrell, 2018 February.
• “GPU Ray Tracing in One Weekend” by Jeremy Cowles, 2018 March.
• “GDC Retrospective and Additional Thoughts on Real-Time Raytracing” by Colin Barré-Brisebois, 2018 April.
• A bunch of interesting blog posts on importance sampling etc. by Joe Schutte, 2018 March-May.
• “minpt: A path tracer in 300 lines of C++” by Hisanari Otsu, 2018 May.
• “D3D12 Raytracing Samples” by Microsoft, 2018 May.
• “Writing a Portable CPU/GPU Ray Tracer in C#” by Eric Mellino, 2018 May.
• “GPU Ray Tracing in Unity – Part 1” and “GPU Path Tracing in Unity – Part 2” by David Kuri, 2018 May.
• “Stochastic All the Things: Raytracing in Hybrid Real-time Rendering” by Tomasz Stachowiak, 2018 May.
• “Adding texturing to a GLSL path tracer” by Michael Cameron, 2018 May.
• “Denoising with Kernel Prediction and Asymmetric Loss Functions” by Thijs Vogels, Fabrice Rousselle, Brian McWilliams, Gerhard Röthlin, Alex Harvill, David Adler, Mark Meyer, Jan Novák, 2018 June.
• Series on path tracer in Rust (initial, threading, SIMD, more SIMD) by Cameron Hart, 2018 May-June.
• “Gradients, Poisson’s Equation and Light Transport (two minute papers)” by Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, 2015 October.
• “Compressed Leaf Bounding Volume Hierarchies” by Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, Sven Woop, Attila Áfra, 2018 June.
• “The other pathtracer” series (job system, triangles, complex scenes, optimizing AABB-Ray) by Carmelo Fernández-Agüera Tortosa, 2018 June.
• “Metal for Ray Tracing Acceleration” by Sean James, Wayne Lister, 2018 June.
• Another raytracing blogpost series (rendering equation, image output, ray-sphere intersection, camera and anti-aliasing, diffuse materials, reflecting materials) by Victor Li, 2018 July.
• Ray tracer with Metal Performance Shaders by Serhii Rieznik, 2018 June-July.
• Quick Path Tracer project in C++ by Rory Driscoll, 2018 June.
• “Pathtraced Depth of Field & Bokeh” by Alan Wolfe, 2018 July.
• “GPU based clay simulation and ray tracing tech in Claybook” by Sebastian Aaltonen, 2018 July.
• “Sampling Anisotropic Microfacet BRDF” by Cao Jiayin, 2018 July.
• CUDA Pathtracer blog series (preparation, first project, lightweight kernel, optimizing memory transfers, compacting non-active rays) by @voxel_tracer, 2018 June-July.
• “Swallowing the elephant (optimizing pbrt for Moana scene)” by Matt Pharr, 2018 July.

Thanks for the adventure so far, everyone!

Put the fork away | It’s not a sailor’s way
We are gentlemen | Don’t eat the captain