raytracer-from-scratch

A hobby-level raytracer written from-scratch, featuring:

• a sphere primitive
• a variety of light sources (point, ambient, directional)
• shininess
• reflections

Terminal-based rendering (just for fun):

Implementation details:

• left-hand coordinate system
• camera looks in +Z direction
• a GeoGebra scene I used to debug this (proved very effective!)

Installation

clone https://github.com/fahlerile/raytracer-from-scratch
cd raytracer-from-scratch
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
cd bin
./raytracer

Use

CLI options

• --help - show help message
• --terminal-rendering - use terminal rendering

Scene configuration

To configure your scene, you should change scene.json in bin/ directory. All available primitives and light sources are listed in Sphere and Light header files. In your JSON file you should put the same arguments as requested in these primitives/light sources constructors.

Example:

From Light/DirectionalLight/DirectionalLight.hpp

DirectionalLight(double intensity, color_t color, vec3d direction);

That means if you want your directional light to be white, 100% intense and to "look" in +Z direction, you should put this in your scene file (to be more precise, in light_sources section):

{
    "type": "DirectionalLight",
    "intensity": 1,
    "color": [255, 255, 255, 255],
    "direction": [0, 0, 1]
}

TODO/NOTES

New features:

• Add other primitives
  • Planes
  • Mathematical functions
  • Cylinder
  • Cone
  • Torus
  • Polygon
• Camera transform (camera matrix)
• Camera configuration in scene.json
• Real-time rendering, camera movement

Potential bug causes:

• alpha parameter is changing during color_t arithmetic (should it?)