Week 1: Laying the groundwork

So the main order of business for this week was presenting my proposal, deciding on a rendering framework to use, and getting off the ground with it.

The general structure of the project is in two parts (with a short first section section to find my bearings within my rendering framework): The first section will be dedicated to rolling my own basic path-tracer that runs on the CPU. While I'm not aiming to hit any particular speed target, I am aiming to support different materials, light sources, and textures. The second section will use Nvidia's VK_Raytracing to build a similar path tracer running on the GPU. This one will have all the functionality of the previous CPU-based path-tracer while also running as close to real time as I can manage through the inclusion of a denoising algorithm.

Moving on from the presentation, I settled on Nvidia's Falcor, both because it seemed faster and less complicated to get up and running, as well as because I plan on using Nvidia's ray-tracing support, which already has integration with Falcor. After about an hour of updating everything under the sun, I was able to download Falcor from Nvidia's Github page for it and get it up and running on my machine and was able to run some of the example code that came bundled with the demo to start familiarizing myself with how it worked.