Ray Tracing

This repository documents my ongoing study of ray tracing principles, drawing knowledge from raytracing.github.io. Although the site provides code examples, I've opted to heavily refactor and customize my implementations for learning purposes and to, at times, improve on the code's quality. Notable changes include:

• More consistent organising of code into classes
• Utilising modern C++ (C++14 and up)

Final Result

Stages

(In reverse-chronological order)

9. Make Camera Movable

Changes

• Add a field of view to camera
• Enable rotation functionality for camera

8. Add Dielectric (ie. clear) Material

Changes

• Add dielectric material
• Add reflectance

7. Add Materials

Changes

• Add abstract class for materials
• Add metal and lambertian materials
• Add fuzz factor for metal reflection rays

6. Improve on Diffuse Material

Changes

• Remove 'shadow acne'
• Alter to use true Lambertian reflection
• Add gamma correction, giving a more accurate color intensity

5. Add A Simple Diffuse Material

Changes

• Add Countdown to track progress of render()
• Implement a simple diffuse material

4. Add Antialiasing

Changes

• Colour sphere according to its normal vectors
• Create abstract class HittableEntity and class ListOfHittables
• Add Interval class and some misc. utility functions
• Add antialiasing

3. Add Sphere to the Scene

Changes

• Create Sphere class
• Detect if ray hits sphere. If so, ray_colour() returns black

2. Flesh out initial Code

Changes

• Add a Camera and Viewport class
• Flesh out rendering logic, rendering an image (see above) based on the y-direction of the rays

1. Initial Stage

Changes

• Make Python script to view PPM images and integrated it into my C++ code
• Start creating some of the core classes and functions: Vec3, Ray, render(), etc.
• Render first image (with some temporary function bodies) to test that the whole process from file creation, writing to the file, to loading/viewing it with the Python script ran correctly

Dependencies

This project uses fmt and Microsoft's gsl libraries. You can download them with:

brew install fmt
brew install cpp-gsl

Building and Running

To build and run, follow these steps:

1. Clone or download this repository to your local machine.
2. Make sure you have the required dependencies installed: fmt and Microsoft's gsl libraries.
3. Open your terminal and navigate to the project directory.
4. Compile the source code using your preferred C++20 compiler, ensuring that the required dependencies are linked
5. Run the program.