Project status: in development

The aRt project aims to create an OpenCL raytracing pipeline implemented as a LuaJIT library (powered by OpenCL for Lua) in order to reach maximum flexibility.

The rendering process will be roughly structured as follows:

• Geometries and materials are loaded, registered and inserted into the program code by the preprocessor.
• A scene is created and filled with objects.
  • An object consists of a geometry, a material and their properties such as position.
• A k-d tree is built from the scene and uploaded to the device.
  • Each leaf node will only contain the IDs of the geometry, material and their property structs. While geometries and materials will have to be hard-coded and looked up using a switch-construct, properties are stored as structs inside an array.
• The program is compiled, uploaded to the device and jobs for rendering small chunks of the image (and then assembling them in global storage) are enqueued.
• Once all jobs have been finished, the result can be downloaded from global storage, processed and saved.

The scene can be modified (objects added/removed, properties adjusted) without recompiling the OpenCL program, as long as no geometries or materials are added.