Graphics From Scratch

Five small C++ renderers, each building on the last: 2D computational geometry, a ray tracer, a recursive ray tracer with shadows/reflection/refraction, a BVH-accelerated mesh ray tracer, and a full software rasterization pipeline with animated output.

Stage	What it renders
geometry/	Point-in-polygon tests via ray casting
raytracer/	Spheres and planes, orthographic/perspective, Blinn-Phong shading
raytracer-advanced/	Shadows, reflection, refraction, procedural Perlin-noise texturing
bvh-mesh-renderer/	Triangle meshes accelerated with a bounding-volume hierarchy
rasterizer/	A from-scratch vertex/fragment shader pipeline with a software z-buffer, exported as rotating GIFs

Sample output

More renders, including wireframe and flat-shading GIFs, are in each stage's renders/ folder linked above.

Stack

C++11, Eigen for linear algebra, stb_image_write for PNG export, gif-h for animated GIF export. Each stage is a standalone CMake project; none of the three libraries are vendored in this repo — CMake's FetchContent downloads them at configure time.

Building

Each stage builds the same way:

cd <stage>/
cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build
cd build && ./<stage-name>

The first configure downloads Eigen/stb/gif-h and takes 15-30s; after that it's cached.

Verified: all five stages configure, build, and run correctly (build tools: CMake 3.31, GCC 6.3). On some older GCC/MinGW builds, Eigen's fixed-size vectorized types trigger a stack-alignment assertion — if you hit eigen_unaligned_array_assert_workaround, add -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-DEIGEN_DONT_VECTORIZE to the cmake -S . -B build step. This isn't needed on MSVC, Linux GCC/Clang, or modern MinGW-w64.

Note on the renders

The renders/ folders here are actual output from running each program locally (verified during setup, not copied from anywhere) — none of it is a course-provided reference image.

🎓 Project Context

Built as part of CSC 305: Introduction to Computer Graphics at the University of Victoria (Summer 2025).

⚠️ Academic Integrity Notice

This repository is maintained for portfolio and educational purposes only. If you are currently enrolled in CSC 305 at the University of Victoria or a similar computer graphics course, please note that using this code in your own assignments may constitute a violation of Academic Integrity policies.