Welcome to my first steps on raytracers!
I've always been fascinated by this algorithm and how it combines rendering, shaders, and compute shaders.
I wanted to explore this world and get as close as possible to a production-ready ray tracer.
I fell really far from a production-ready pipeline but I got to render meshes instead of just mathematical volumes like spheres.
I say I wanted to get close to a production-ready environment because my only previous experience with ray marching was some shaders I developed at shadertoy.
Those gave me a starting point and all the experience I had before starting the UnityRTX project but was even further than this from a game.
Please feel free to take a look at my sahdertoy:
https://www.shadertoy.com/user/arnauaguilaremanuel
I say I wanted to get close to a production-ready environment because my only previous experience with raymarching was some shaders I developed at shadertoy.
Those gave me a starting point and all the experience I had before starting the UnityRTX project but was even further than this from a game.
This first approach made me wonder how far could I personally get the rendering fidelity. Documentation is pretty scarce or really complicated to replicate on unity. After a long time of diving into papers, posts, and tutorials, I ended up with what you can see on the video and the screenshots below. This is far from a real-time renderer but the lighting is much more accurate and results in far better-looking images.
This implementation is missing a dedicated denoiser, the only thing denoising the image is the accumulation of frames, which also helps a lot with smoothing out edges, so stay tuned for the updated project with a denoiser!
Youtube compression is not the best in the world, so here you can find some renders from this project: