C++ Raytracer | cpp-raytracer

Overview

This is a raytracer written in C++ following the Ray tracing in one weekend book. The purpose of thie project is to generate realistic images by simulating shadows, reflection, refraction and many other natural phenomenon. I also wanted to use linear algebra, so I worked on this personal project.

Homepage

https://github.com/ananthvk/cpp-raytracer

Features

• Shadows, diffuse materials
• Reflections, metals, refractions and glass
• Simple geometric shapes such as spheres
• Anti-aliasing
• Multithreading

Getting started

Requirements

1. A C++ 11 compiler, (GCC, MSVC, etc)
2. CMake >= 3.10
3. Git (optional)

You can install the packages on linux using your preferred package manager. For example on ubuntu,

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake

On windows, install mingw and cmake.

Building

Get the sources

git clone https://github.com/ananthvk/cpp-raytracer.git

Otherwise you can also download the source directly from github.

Build the project

cd cpp-raytracer
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

On linux based systems

make

Then run the application with

./raytracer

On windows

On windows, open the project in MSVC and build the project. Or you can also install mingw and use gcc for compilation. Run the generated executable.

Project structure

A list of files in src directory with a short description.

File	Description
camera.cpp and camera.hpp	Has the camera class, which produces rays cast into the scene
colors.hpp	Defines color types, lerp for color, common colors and gamma correction.
commons.hpp	Common functions - random number functions, intersection, interaction structs
config.hpp	Default configuration for the raytracer
frombook.hpp	Methods copied from book to test a particular functionality
image.hpp and image.cpp	Functions for writing the image to a file
main.cpp	Entry point for the program, main function
material.hpp and material.cpp	Material class and defines various materials such as lambertian, glass, and metals.
objects.hpp and objects.cpp	Different objects used in raytracing - spheres
progressbar.hpp	Functions to display progressbar on the console
raytracer.hpp and raytracer.cpp	Single threaded and multi threaded raytracer class and functions. They perform the main task of raytracing
scene.hpp and scene.cpp	Defines the scene to be used for raytracing.

Sample renders

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Credits

• stb_image_write.h and stb_image.h for writing images - https://github.com/nothings/stb/
• linalg.h for vectors - https://github.com/sgorsten/linalg

References

https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.html