Virtual Rendering Engine

A Java ray tracer supporting recursive Phong shading, BVH acceleration, soft shadows, depth of field, and glossy reflection/refraction, with scenes defined declaratively in XML or JSON.

Authors: Matt Kuperwasser and Moshe Hanau.

Gallery

Features

• Recursive Phong shading (emission, ambient, diffuse, specular, shadows, reflection, refraction)
• Geometric primitives: sphere, plane, triangle, polygon, cylinder, tube
• BVH acceleration with SAH-based splitting
• Anti-aliasing / soft shadows / depth of field via adaptive beam sampling
• Scene definition via XML or JSON
• Multi-threaded rendering
• A simple Swing GUI for launching and viewing renders

Build / test / run

The project builds with Maven (pom.xml).

• mvn test — compile and run the fast unit/component/integration tests
• mvn test -Dgroups=render -DexcludedGroups= — run only the slow render/image-generation tests (writes to images/)
• mvn test -DexcludedGroups= — run everything, including renders
• mvn compile — compile only
• mvn exec:java — launch the GUI (gui.RenderApp)

Architecture

• primitives — Point, Vector, Ray, Color, Double3, Material, Util
• geometries — Intersectable, Geometry, and implementations (Sphere, Plane, Triangle, Polygon, Cylinder, Tube, Geometries)
• lighting — LightSource, AmbientLight, DirectionalLight, PointLight, SpotLight
• scene — Scene, SceneLoader, XmlSceneLoader, JsonSceneLoader
• renderer — Camera, ImageWriter, RayTracerBase, SimpleRayTracer, BeamSampler, PixelManager
• gui — RenderApp/RenderWindow, a Swing front end for launching and viewing scenes

Scene definitions live under sceneSourceFiles/{xml,json}/; rendered output is written to images/.

Dependencies

• org.json:json — JSON scene parsing
• org.junit.jupiter:junit-jupiter — tests