I’ve been slowly developing a raytracer which has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience both from a technical standpoint and the theoretical side of physically-based rendering.

I’m at a point now where I am importing meshes of a larger nature, and I was not content with my BVH implementation. As much as I would like to read the state of the art papers on BVH construction and traversal and implement them myself, I’ve decided to opt to use embree instead. I would rather focus on the light transport part and focus on getting prettier images and getting them to converge quicker from an algorithmic standpoint. As a friend of mine said, I have to pick my battles, and embree is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for me so that I can focus more on what I’d like to write.

Setting up embree with CMake is quite easy I’ve got the full source code of this post available here , and I won’t go into details into how to set it up - the CMakeLists.txt is quite self explanatory and I’ve added as much comments as I can.

As great and as fleshed out the samples are, there is a lot of boilerplate code, written in different header files. This put me off initially but with a bit of digging, and building the samples with a powerful IDE went long way in help way in helping me zip around the API and the headers.

I thought it would be interesting to write the simplest thing I can think of with embree, a hello world ray tracing example if you will, I’ll explain below what we’ll do.