Introduction to PBRT

The algorithm(s) for my thesis will be developed in the PBRT ray tracer. I familiarized myself with the ideas, code and the used algorithms by reading the book Physically Based Rendering and today I spent some time going through the source code.

As a first test and as a usefull tool, I created a class which outputs a false color image of the number of intersection tests during rendering. Here is some of the output when run on the standard PBRT scénes:

The Stanford Bunny

False color image when using the Bounding Volume Hierarchy.
The maximum number of intersections is 963.
The total number of intersections is 31,468,464 

False color image when using a kD-tree.
The maximum number of intersections is 772.
The total number of intersections is 8,967,463.

False color image when using a uniform grid.
The maximum number of intersections is 3519.
The total number of intersections is 40,690,247.

The number of intersection also includes the number of box and voxel intersections for the bounding volume hierarchy and grid.

Next thing to do is setting up an svn or git repository for the code.