Planning and evaluation

You have been asked to build a ray tracer from first principles, using the C++ programming language.

The goal of this project is to develop your engineering skills, your ability to design and execute complex software development. The following are therefore considered contrary to the spirit of the exercise and will not be allowed or accepted:

• Copying or adapting, in any way, existing ray tracer repositories on Git-Hub or elsewhere.

• Using Chat-GPT, or any other artificial intelligence, to write your code.

I will frequently ask you to explain your code, and you will be penalized if you cannot sufficiently explain your data structure or algorithms.

Calendar

Date	Theme	Format	For Evaluation
Tuesday 28 October, morning	Client needs & technical brief
Tuesday 28 October, afternoon	Vision and strategy	Course + discussion (1 hour)
Wednesday 29 October	Piloting a technical project	Course + discussion (1 hour)
Friday 31 October	Evaluation 1: Vision & Strategy	Group meeting	Yes
Monday 3 November	Work at Hetic (obligatory), questions and answers
Tuesday 4 November	Progress meeting at Hetic (obligatory)		Yes
Friday 7 November	Presentation of final project	Group evaluation in the form of a Client Presentation
-
Monday 1 December	New engineering theme related to the Raytracer
Monday 1 December	Individual Code Reviews for the RayTracer (evaluation)	Code Review	Yes
Tuesday 2 December	Delivery of Technical Poster	PDF, or SVG	Yes
1 - 5 December	Individual work on evolving the Raytracer	Courses, exercises and Katas	Yes

Deliverables

For this project it is obligatory to use industry standard tooling for collaborating with your peers..

Top tip: You may or may not have random spot-checks to see that you have tooling in place and are using it effectively.

The deliverables and dates are as follows :

• Friday 31 October : the PDF containing your Vision, described here

• Friday 7 October : Your final presentation package for the client

• Monday 1 December : Code Review, in person, where you choose a part of your code and present it to me

• Tuesday 2 December : the PDF containing your Technical Poster described here

The final presentation package must consist of the following:

• The image(s) rendered by your software (ready to be transferred as a .zip file)

• A table describing an analysis of the performance of your software (total rendering time of your image(s))

• You will be asked to render an image live in front of the client

• A link to the GitHub project

• A link to your JIRA

Notation of the final product

Scoring is done à la carte. A functional minimum viable product (MVP) will earn you a passing score. You are then free to implement any techniques you wish to improve your score, up to a maximum of 20 points.

The following rating scale will be used to evaluate the project:

Aspect	Note
Functional base product
A functional C++ executable	1
A PNG image is produced	1
At a minimum, flat rendering of a sphere is achieved	1
At a minimum, diffuse rendering of a sphere is achieved	2
Rendering of a plane	1
Reflections	2
C++ architecture and code quality
Data structures	1
Clean code	1
Algorithms used and correctly explained	1
Additional points
Surface shaders other than diffuse shaders	3
Rendering of other shapes	3
Rendering of a 3D model (.obj, .fbx, etc.)	3
Optimization strategy	up to 8 points
Advanced surface rendering techniques	3
Structured scene modeling language	2
Any other feature that is sufficiently explained and implemented	3