Nori is a minimalistic ray tracer written in C++. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS and provides a foundation for the homework assignments in the course Image Synthesis taught at ENSICAEN. The framework was originally designed by Wenzel Jakob for tutorials at ETH Zürich.
While Nori provides much support code to simplify your development work as much as possible, the code that you will initially receive from us does very little: it loads a scene and saves a rendered image as an OpenEXR image—but the actual rendering code is missing, hence the output image just consists of black pixels. Your task will be to extend this system to a full-fledged physically-based renderer as part of programming assignments and your final project.
You may find the following general references useful:
Feel free to consult additional references when completing projects, but remember cite them in your writeup.
When asked to implement feature \(X\), we request that you don't go and read the source code of the implementation of \(X\) in some other renderer, because you will likely not learn much in the process. The PBRT book is excluded from this rule. If in doubt, get in touch with the course staff.
The goal of these exercises is to help you create the foundation of a good renderer for subsequent assignments and the rendering competition. It is your job to convince us that you have implemented the assignments correctly, through the information provided in your reports and the quality/readability of your code. We will deduct points for poorly written code or inconclusive comparisons/validations in your report. Make sure to start working on the homework as early as possible. Building your own advanced renderer is a lot of fun. Use this great opportunity, and don’t forget to have fun!
The codebase with your solution and source files. Do NOT include: binaries (i.e. remove the build folder), external dependencies (i.e. remove nori/ext) and class-provided scenes (i.e. remove nori/scenes).
Include a completed report based on the template available here and adhere to the following conventions:
We would appreciate any comments or criticism to improve the projects in future years. Please use the first section of your report to provide feedback--naturally, this part will not be graded. Examples of information that is useful to us includes:
Late submissions are subject to the grading scheme as discussed in the first lecture: submitting a homework late (which is interpreted strictly, i.e. using the exact submission time on Moodle) consumes a late day. You have a budget of 3 "free" late days that can be used for any assignment without penalties. After this budget is used up, the grade of the late submission is affected as follows: