Jesper and I have finished the first assignment in the "Advanced shading and rendering" course. We were given an unfinished raytracer and had to implement shading, shadows, reflections, refractions and super-sampling.

We had to implement at least one super-sampling scheme but we decided to make a comparision between a few schemes and ended up implementing uniform grid, stratified grid and adaptive. The latter is especially intresting since it tries to distribute the rays over the pixel area in a optimal way, resulting in good image quality and fast rendering.

The top screenshot shows the test scene rendered with 5x5 uniform grid super-sampling and the bottom shot is a close-up comparison between different sampling schemes.