This is a toy rudimentary path tracer, built while following along with Peter Shirley's "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" book. It's the first book in a three part series that can be read online here (thanks to all who maintain the code and online versions!).
It's implemented in c99. The books are great and make a fun project so I may end up doing this all over again in a different language. The repo is organized accordingly.
The tracer currently supports everything covered in the first book. This means:
- Spherical geometry
- Ideal Lambertian materials - "Matte" objects the reflect light diffusely.
- Metal materials - Objects that reflect light like a mirror. There is also an
optional
fuzzfactor that jitters reflected light, giving a rough appearance. - Dielectrics - Objets that both reflect and refract. Refraction calculated in accordance with Snell's law, bendind light according to the ratio of the dielectric constants of the materials at the boundary. Schlick's approximation is used to decide if a ray should reflect, generating greater reflection at steaper viewing angles.
- A positionable and orientable camera.
- Depth-of-focus blur.
Use the Makefile provided to build the tracer. A convenient CLI for the program
is not provided. The executable takes three arguments, the output scene width,
the output scene height, and the scene type. Only gradient and spheres are
supported. The makefile has targets for generating these scenes as well.
- Multithreading
- Touch up the progress printer and put it under a verbose flag.
- Consider a simple camera/scene configuration file format and parser
- The next book!