TODO.md

TODO List

• Re-add support for specular materials - Medium - Added in 20f4b81
• Create a OpenGL renderer view - Easy/Medium
  • Start with just being able to switch between path tracing and OpenGL
  • Need to decide whether to use "modern" OpenGL, or fixed pipeline
    • Leaning towards modern, since custom shaders might be useful in the future
    • In addition, I am more familiar with the modern model, since it is more similar to DX11
• Be able to debug parts of the render - Hard
  • I'm envisioning something like RenderDoc
  • So you press a button to "Record the next frame".
  • Then it records all the rays that are shot, etc.
    • This will be diffucult to cleanly implement
      • We will need to come up with a way to serialize different types of 'events'
        • Perhaps some kind of polymorphism
        • With base member values, like pixel pos, and path number, to help sort/bin the events
    • Since it will somehow require instrumenting a lot of the code base, and passing around a 'logger' object, (per thread)
    • If possible, I would prefer if the instrumentation could be compiled out with pre-processor type logic
      • So in full release builds, the logging code doesn't exist
    • Initial ideas:
      • Pass the logger in as a dependency for functions
      • Surround logger code with a macro or #ifdef guards
      • If logging is disabled, the logger dependency might be removed in dead code elimination
        • It wouldn't be the end of the world if it didn't, since the logger param will just be a pointer
  • After the record, it switches to OpenGL view, where you can view the results
    • The interface for this is going to be one of the hardest parts
    • I would like it to be something like RenderDoc, where you can 'pick' a pixel, and see all the paths drawn
    • It would be very nice to be able to visualize the sampling.
      • For example, to draw the disc and ray chosen for general area light shapes
• Implement other BRDFs - Medium
• Implement normal/UV interpolation - Easy - Added in 6735168, 2c92ec3, 25a16f2
• Implement JSON scene loading - Medium Added in b021497, 1f03f32, c762815
• Implement using textures for material properties - Medium
  • First, implement UV interpolation
  • Then using that to get real triangle UVs, implement the others
  • https://github.com/syoyo/tinyexr and/or https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h could be really nice drop-ins for the actual reading of the texture data
• Create a nice test render scene - Medium/Hard
  • Start purusing some free 3D model sites
  • And free PBR texture sites
    • https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?90245-Free-PBR-Texture-Vol-01
    • http://opengameart.org/content/yughues-free-pbr-metal-plates
    • http://freepbr.com/
  • I have access to Quixel Suite, but I won't be able to re-distribute them
  • But, on that note, I probably won't share the scenes in git, since they will be quite large
    • Perhaps, for the scenes that are redistributable, I can upload them to my site
• Implement transmissive materials - Medium
  • Implement ideal specular refraction and transmission - Added in 4feb070
  • Implement isotropic scattering media - Added in eff77d8
  • Implement non-isotripic scattering media (Henyey-Greenstein, Raleigh, etc.)
• Have a framebuffer / visualization that shows how many bounces each pixel is averaging
  • Heatmap??
• Update camera to full cartesian