Forge and Crucible

As I first started to learn more about computer graphics, I wanted to see how much I could do outside of Unity & Unreal. So, I took to vanilla C++ to try writing a path-tracer; a simple, albeit extremely inefficient raytracing method that calculates the way beams of light would bounce around objects in order to color the scene.

This was an extremely useful exercise; not just for the ego boost that I got from seeing an image I personally made pop up after compiling, but because it allowed me to really understand how different materials are rendered, how to affect the reflections on a metal surface, how to calculate how glass warps the images behind it. I was only ever able to render spheres with this setup (even the plane you see here is just a massive, stretched out, sphere!), but the sheer amount of stuff I learned from this project makes it sentimental to me.