Apart from working on SIGGRAPH paper submissions, I’ve been helping my advisor Steve Marschner teach Cornell’s graduate-level graphics course CS6630 this semester. My job was to create a compact rendering framework that students can use (and understand) in a sequence of increasingly difficult assignments.
PBRT and Mitsuba were not an option: they are both much too large for a one-semester course, and all fun components are already “done” (i.e. not available for assignments). So we decided to make a new framework called Nori.
It is always tempting to stop working on a piece of code as soon as it produces good-looking results (which might still be subtly incorrect). An important design goal of Nori was to really force students to end up with the right answer. Thus, each assignment comes with a battery of statistical hypothesis tests to ensure correctness.
We use χ2 goodness of fit-tests to validate sample generation and Student’s t-test to check if the submitted MC integrators converge to the right value.
Everything is licensed under the GPL and thus also available to instructors at other institutions. If you are interested, please get in touch.