What is ballistae?

ballistae is an (approximately) physically-correct path tracer. Let's unpack that a little:

• path tracer: ballistae fires rays out of a camera, and lets them bounce around the scene until they strike something that emits radiative power. The material interactions at each stop on the path are then used to compute the color received by the camera.
• physically-correct: ballistae doesn't cheat to achieve its effects. Rather than working with colors, it works with precise spectral distributions.

The net effect is that ballistae produces very realistic images, but extremely slowly. Each of the images below took approximately two hours to produce on a four-core machine. Even longer runtimes with more oversampling are required to get rid of the path tracer speckling that's visible in all the example images.

Sample Images

Code

ballistae is available via git:

https://gitlab.com/ahmedtd/ballistae.git