Ray Tracing

Traditional 3D computer graphics focus on rendering the exterior of objects. Volume rendering is a technique used to visualize information corresponding to the interior of an object, commonly used in medical imaging and other fields. Visualization of such data may be accomplished by ray casting; similar to ray tracing. Rendering each pixel can be done in parallel, so massively parallel architectures like GPGPU can dramatically speed up rendering.

I’ve long been active in PSP development and decided to have some fun with graphics on the PSP. I asked my university to order two PSP dev systems and I got to work porting my ray tracer to the PSP. As a team effort with three other graphics enthusiasts, we decided to accelerate hypertexturing on the PSP using the VFPU. We ended up with a ray tracer, hypertexturer, and volume ray caster working on the PSP capable of displaying a 64x64x64 voxel volume.

This code is branched from the Ray Tracer code, with the perlin noise function added and the hit function and normal calculations for the volume of noise/density.

This was my first ray tracer, implemented on the CPU using OpenGL and GLUT to present to the screen, and coded in Dev-C++. It is largely inspired by the ray tracer used in the book Ray Tracing from the Ground Up, an excellent and highly recommended book on ray tracing by Kevin Suffern.