Ray Tracing in One Weekend

A C++ implementation of the book * Ray Tracing in One Weekend* by Peter Shirley.

Overview

This project walks through the basics of ray tracing, following the structure from the book. It covers core concepts like rays, materials, lighting, and advanced features like anti-aliasing and defocus blur.

Key features:

• Basic Ray Tracing: Render simple scenes with spheres and basic lighting.
• Materials: Add realism with diffuse, reflective, and transparent materials.
• Anti-Aliasing: Smooth edges with multi-sampling.
• Defocus Blur: Simulate camera effects with depth of field.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• C++11 or later
• A C++ compiler (g++, clang, etc.)
• Make or CMake for building

Building

1. Clone the repo:

   # clone the repo
   git clone https://github.com/Akamitori/ray_tracing_in_one_weekend.git
   
   # change the directory to the repo directory
   cd ray_tracing_in_one_weekend
   

2. Build the project:

   # Using CMake
   mkdir build && cd build
   cmake ..
   make

3. Build Configurations:

   • By default, CMake builds in Debug mode, which includes extra debugging symbols and performs less aggressive optimizations.

   • To build in Release mode for better performance:

     cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
     make

   • To build in Debug mode (if needed):

     cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
     make

Running

Once built, run the ray tracer:

./raytracer

The output image will be generated as a .ppm file with the name output.ppm.

Viewing the output

The output can be viewed with any photo processing program or by using IrfanView or by using this online PPM viewer

Performance notes

Since this is a brute force raytracer it is bound to be slow. The commited code issues the high res settings needed to produce the image. This generation will take about 5 minutes to 1 hour on release build depending on the number of CPU cores. This can be sped up by sacrificing some quality in our generation. Replace this in main.cpp

cam.image_width = 1200;
cam.samples_per_pixel = 500;
cam.max_depth = 50;

with

cam.image_width = 1200;     // we can also reduce image widgh by this is bound to not draw some spheres
cam.samples_per_pixel = 100;
cam.max_depth = 10;

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.