evanw / evanw/webgl-path-tracing

Is this a real path tracer?

Open
#4 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
372
Forks
60
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

The description mentions

>To calculate a pixel color, a ray is shot into the scene and allowed to bounce around five times. At each bounce, the direct light incoming at that point (including shadows) is multiplied by all previous material colors and accumulated. Soft shadows are achieved by randomly jittering the light position per-pixel.

That sounds more like a small extension to ray tracing. With path tracing, rays should bounce around until they hit a light source and soft shadows should occur naturally. The point of path tracing is that tricks like jittering light positions are not necessary. Admittedly, the advantage of your implementation is that the quality improves really quickly, but it does not appear to be a real path tracer.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.