Multithreading

Documentation: ThreadedMetaTracer class PhotonMap class

Ray tracing can be parallelized quite efficiently in multiple ways. We decided to support two threads during tracing of the image and during photon emission and tracing. To be able to easily combine multithreading with new ways of tracing the scene, we created a Decorator for a general TracingStrategy (such as the SimpleTracer). This can also be combined with the SuperMetaTracer which performs 4 sample rotated grid supersampling.

During photon tracing we use two threads in parallel, one per lightsource.