C implementation of a sphere tracer optimized for maximal single-core performance. See the project report for detailed information and results.

This is our submission for the course project in the Advanced Systems Lab at ETH Zurich.

The sphere tracer supports:

• Shadows
• Rotations
• Specular & mirror reflections
• Anti-aliasing
• Multiple light sources
• Five different objects:
  • Box
  • Sphere
  • Torus
  • Box-frame
  • Plane

make spheretrace to build the sphere tracer.

make test to build the test runner.

The sphere tracer can run in 4 different modes:

• ray: perform ray-vectorization optimizations
• obj: perform object-vectorization optimizations
• mixed: perform both ray and object vectorization
• auto: automatically use most promising optimization technique

See project report for more information on the optimization methods.

To run the sphere tracer on a scene test_scenes/scene.json, run:

./spheretrace -s scene -m [ray|obj|mixed|auto]

In addition to the normal sphere trace application, it's also possible to evaluate the sphere tracer on provided test scenes. For that, add all your test cases inside the test_scenes/ directory and add reference solutions inside reference/

To run all tests:

./test -m [ray|obj|mixed|auto]

It's also possible to evaluate on a subset of scenes, try

./test -s scene1,scene2,scene3 -m [ray|obj|mixed|auto]

The rendered scenes can be found in out/