For all my solo projects graphics side I have used a custom base, built using glut (a simple wraparound for opengl) in C++.

Parallax mapping

Various approaches to the parallax mapping technique, which gives volume to a plane without the need for extra vertices.

Ambient occlusion

Ambient occlusion is a technique to shade areas depending on their surrounding geometry. I follow a method presented by NVIDIA in 2008.

Tessellation

A project where I tried out opengls tessellation shaders and tested them with a simple low poly sphere. Also combined it with other graphics related effects.

Raytracing

A CPU raytracer that creates the whole texture before sending it to the GPU. Handles reflection, refraction, phong based illumination, hard shadows and a simple global illumination.