Ray tracing example #1068
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Ray tracing example #1068
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Cool stuff, worth noting that we will eventually get access to hardware raytracing (on supported hardware) in wgpu: gfx-rs/wgpu#6762 |
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Thank you for the information. I'm also keeping an eye on this :) |
almarklein
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Jun 5, 2025
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almarklein
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I had missed that this was ready. Since this is fully self-contained, I'm happy to add this as an example.
Korijn
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Jun 5, 2025
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This PR implements a simple ray tracer and tests it on the well-known Cornell Box scene. This is an experimental demonstration of ray tracing with compute shaders in pygfx.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique distinct from rasterization. By simulating the physical behavior of light in a scene, it produces visuals that are closer to real-world lighting, with natural support for soft shadows and global illumination. This makes it particularly well-suited for offline rendering scenarios that demand high visual fidelity, such as film-quality rendering.
Below are the rendering results of the Cornell Box scene at different sample-per-pixel (spp) levels:
1000 spp:
10,000 spp:
100,000 spp:
Replacing the small cube in the scene with a transparent glass and applying a mirror-like surface to the front of the big rectangular box, we can get the following rendering result (around 30,000 spp):
I think this example serves as an exploratory starting point for implementing ray tracing with Pygfx. Perhaps in the future, we can have a powerful offline renderer using ray tracing technology in Pygfx :)