Hey there, fellow DAE student, curious visitor, or graphics enthusiast 👋
Welcome to my Graphics Programming 1 – Raytracer repository — part of the third semester (2023) at DAE.
This repo contains all lab exercises and weekly projects created during the Graphics Programming 1 course.
It’s shared mainly for archival and educational purposes — documenting my learning progress in low-level rendering and graphics programming.
⚠️ Keep in mind: these projects were made while learning the fundamentals of computer graphics.
Expect imperfect reflections, noisy shadows, and a few math headaches — it’s all part of the process.
Consider this repo a snapshot of early rendering experiments.
📚 Course: Graphics Programming 1
🏫 University: Howest University of Applied Sciences - Digital Arts and Entertainment
📍 Location: Kortrijk, Belgium
🗓️ Academic year: 2023–24 | Third semester
🎓 Study load: 6 credits
⏱️ Total study time: 180 hours
- Co-ordinator: Koen Samyn
- Other teaching staff: Flor Delombaerde, Pieter-Jan Vandenberghe
- Handles stress and workload effectively while meeting deadlines.
- Creates and follows a planning to ensure project progress.
- Uses version control systems to track and manage development efficiently.
- Monitors personal and project progress over time.
- Maintains a critical attitude toward own work and peers’ work, benchmarking results to industry standards.
- Detects technical and visual errors down to the pixel level.
- Reviews and validates code quality and maintainability.
- Develops 3D applications iteratively, applying feedback from stakeholders.
- Selects and applies efficient rendering algorithms for 3D scenes.
- Measures and evaluates application performance.
- Analyzes and optimizes graphics performance in real-time contexts.
- Implements Physically Based Rendering (PBR) techniques in a 3D environment.
- Uses game engines correctly to solve design and technical problems.
- Writes structured, readable, and maintainable code within a game project.
- Integrates and evaluates middleware, external services, and frameworks under technical and production constraints.
- Implements lighting systems in 3D applications using shader languages.
- Raytracing fundamentals
- Scene intersection & acceleration
- Stochastic sampling & filtering
- PBR shading models
- 3D mesh loading & textures
- Optimization techniques
All lab exercises and progress are on the main branch, structured by week.
Each milestone corresponds to a weekly task or feature implementation.
Weekly or major updates are available in the 📦 Releases section.
Example:
graphics_programming_1-raytracer-1.0.0-windows-x64.zip
Includes a prebuilt Windows x64 executable with example scenes and assets.
This repository represents my first steps into 3D graphics programming — writing my own raytracer from scratch, debugging math errors, and finally watching pixels turn into realistic images.
It’s messy, rewarding, and a huge learning milestone toward understanding rendering pipelines.
If you’re diving into graphics yourself: stick with it, visualize the math, and enjoy the moment you see your first reflection render correctly ✨
This repository is licensed under the MIT License — feel free to explore, learn, or reuse for study purposes.
Made with vectors, rays, and a lot of debug draws 💻
— Ádám