Rendering

DTU 02562 · physically based ray tracing built from scratch in WebGPU. Each week's exercises run live in the browser — pick one below.

Interactive exercises render with WebGPU; open them in Chrome or Edge (or Safari 18+). The progressive path tracers (Weeks 7–9) sharpen over a second or two as samples accumulate.

Week 1 — Getting started — camera rays

1a · Clear to black
1b · Coloured rectangle
1c · Pinhole camera rays
2 · Aspect ratio + camera basis
3 · Ray–object intersections
4 · Diffuse shading
5 · Interactive camera zoom

Week 2 — Shadows, mirrors & glass

1 · Hard shadows
2 · Mirror reflections
3 · Refraction
4 · Phong illumination
5 · Glossy (Phong + refraction)

Week 3 — Textures & sampling

1 · Texture addressing & filtering
2 · Plane texturing
3 · Stratified jitter sampling
4 · Texture filtering exploration

Week 4 — Radiometry & photometry

Written solutions document

Week 5 — Triangle meshes

1 · Indexed triangle mesh
2 · Teapot, directional light
3 · Smooth shading (interpolated normals)
4 · Cornell box materials
5 · Cornell box with an area light

Week 6 — Acceleration — BSP trees

1 · AABB test & GPU timing
2 · BSP tree traversal
3 · Cornell box on a BSP tree
4 · BSP Cornell box with spheres

Week 7 — Path tracing

1 · Progressive Cornell box
2 · Soft shadows (area-light sampling)
3 · Path-traced indirect illumination

Week 8 — Transparency & caustics

1 · Fresnel transparent sphere
2 · Caustics with indirect illumination
3 · Absorption in the glass sphere

Week 9 — Environment lighting (HDR)

1 · Environment-mapped object
2 · HDR environment + holdout
3 · Environment + directional sun
4 · Bryanston Park HDRI

Week 10 — Production rendering (Blender)

Lab journal — synthetic objects in a photographed environment document