Four months ago, I first began my foray into the world of computer graphics thanks to the Ray Tracing in One Weekend mini-book by Peter Shirley.
Since then I have worked my way through all three books, making my own improvements to the renderer they describe as I went. These included multithreading support, triangle mesh intersections and a live render progress window powered by OpenGL.
The renderer I have created is great as a first attempt, but it has its problems. Reflective materials such as metal or glass produce large artifacts when applied to anything but a sphere, whilst features implemented early on such as motion blur have been outright ignored in the latter stages of development, partly due to their lack of usage on my part.
As such, I have decided that rather than fix these mistakes, I would prefer to begin anew. I’ve taken most of my improvements from this renderer and ported them over to create an empty shell of a renderer – Gaia.
This blog will document the development of Gaia complete with bugs, milestones and, of course, any impressive renders I make.