Bachelor Thesis - Voxel Path Tracing

Created on: July 2024

Team size: 1

Time frame: 7 Months

Tools used: Jai / Vulkan

Repository

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Final project of my studies at SAE Institute Geneva. Implemented Voxel Path Tracing in a Vulkan compute shader using the Jai programming language. The thesis document was made in Typst.

It features :

• Per-voxel and per-pixel lighting
• Diffuse, reflective and emissive materials
• A palette compressed world
• An environment map as a light source

What I Learned

• The Vulkan API: As the project requires the use of compute shaders, and because I wanted to learn the API, Vulkan was chosen.
• Jai: At first the project started with Rust, but then I got access to the beta of Jai, so I decided to use it. It is aimed to be a replacement of C++ geared towards games and the "joy of programming".
• Various path tracing techniques: This project deepened my understanding of the subject, with things such as cosine-weighted sampling and russian roulette.
• Statistics: Doing real-time path tracing requires to apply some statistics concepts, and I also used student's T-test to prove than an optimisation made something faster.

You can see the source of the renderer on Codeberg and see the source of the thesis is also on Codeberg.

The Thesis

You can find the pdf at https://st0wy.codeberg.page/bachelor-thesis/main.pdf.

Screenshots