README.md

rust-raytracer

An implementation of a very simple raytracer based on Ray Tracing in One Weekend by Peter Shirley in Rust. I used this project to learn Rust from scratch - the code may not be perfectly idiomatic, or even good, but it does make pretty pictures.

Additional features beyond Shirley's course:

• Texture mapping (e.g. earth and moon textures below)
• Lighting
• Parallel rendering - will use all CPU cores for best performance
• Read scene data from JSON file
• Render a sky texture

Example output

anim.mp4

Example usage

$ cargo build --release
   Compiling raytracer v0.1.0 (/Users/dps/proj/rust-raytracer/raytracer)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 2.57s

$ ./target/release/raytracer data/test_scene.json out.png

Rendering out.png
Frame time: 2840ms

$ ./target/release/raytracer data/cover_scene.json cover.png

Rendering cover.png
Frame time: 27146ms

Texture mapping

Lighting

Parallel rendering - will use all CPU cores for best performance

Original

🚀 ./target/release/raytracer anim/frame
   Compiling raytracer v0.1.0 (/Users/dps/proj/rust-raytracer/raytracer)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 2.21s

Rendering anim/frame_000.png
............................................................
Frame time: 21s

Using rayon

Rendering anim/frame_000.png
Frame time: 2573ms

Render a sky texture

Read scene data from JSON file

Example

{
  "width": 800,
  "height": 600,
  "samples_per_pixel": 128,
  "max_depth": 50,
  "sky": {
    "texture":"data/beach.jpg"
  },
  "camera": {
    "look_from": { "x": -2.0, "y": 0.5, "z": 1.0 },
    "look_at": { "x": 0.0, "y": 0.0, "z": -1.0 },
    "vup": { "x": 0.0, "y": 1.0, "z": 0.0 },
    "vfov": 50.0,
    "aspect": 1.3333333333333333
  },
  "objects": [
    {
      "center": { "x": 0.0, "y": 0.0, "z": -1.0 },
      "radius": 0.5,
      "material": {
        "Texture": {
          "albedo": [
            1.0,
            1.0,
            1.0
          ],
          "pixels": "data/earth.jpg",
          "width": 2048,
          "height": 1024,
          "h_offset": 0.75
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Make animation

🚀 ffmpeg -f image2 -framerate 15 -i anim/frame_%03d.png -loop -0 anim.gif

Credits

Earth and moon textures from https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/

Extreme lighting example

Progressive max_depth animation