This is a relatively simple whitted style ray tracer boasting the following features:
- Various primitives: Box, Disc, Plane, Rectangle, Sphere, and Triangle.
- Model loading and rendering.
- Texture loading and sampling, supporting everything stb_image supports.
- Frustum culling.
- Camera with aspect ratio and FOV.
- BVH acceleration structure for both the scene and models.
- Programmable shaders.
- Per object materials.
- Krzysztof Narkowicz style ACES Filmic tone mapping.
- Point lights.
- Anti-aliasing, up to 16 rays per pixel.
- Chunked multi-threading.
- Per object transforms, for position, rotation, and scale.
- Bump mapping, and specular mapping.
This is Georgia Tech's Chinese Dragon rendered as a glass material and 4 point lights for style points. It took roughly 16 minutes to render with 16x AA.
This is Crytek's Crysis 2 Nano Suit rendered with bump mapping, specular mapping, and light reflection.
This is a sphere rendered with volumetric absorbtion, which code is in the abandoned VolumetricAbsorbtion branch. The branch is abandoned because it's pretty much a hack on the current architecture, which doesn't support giving the information volumetric absorbtion needs.
These are the things I want to do or add, in no particular order, before I consider this project finished:
- Get rid of the useless disc primitive.
- Remove Color and simply use vectors instead.
- SIMD processing of multiple rays at once.
- Custom model format and loading, including conversion from OBJ.
- Post processing shaders.
- Pre processing shaders.
- Shadows for transparent objects.
- Volumetric absorbtion.
- Ray marched volumetric objects.
- Different and more accurate light types, such as area lights, emissive objects, directional lights, and point lights.
- Path tracing.
- Many many many optimizations.
After cloning run git submodule init && git submodule update to fetch the LotusWaf dependency, which is needed for building.
Install the following (development) packages:
- glfw-3
- libglm
- clang
- python3
./waf configure --target-configuration release
./waf
To compile with GCC instead, add --toolset linux_x86-64_gcc to the configure command line.
Install the following (development) packages:
- libglm
- clang
- python3
./waf configure --target-configuration release --without-glfw-3 --without-OpenGL
./waf
To compile with GCC instead, add --toolset linux_x86-64_gcc to the configure command line.
Install MSYS2 and the following packages:
- git
- mingw-w64-x86_64-python3
- mingw-w64-x86_64-clang OR mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
- mingw-w64-x86_64-glm
- mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw
To install a package in MSYS2, you use the pacman command. Following is an example command to install all packages for a clang build:
pacman -S git mingw-w64-x86_64-python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-clang mingw-w64-x86_64-glm mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw
Open an MSYS2 MINGW64 terminal and navigate to where you want to clone the project, and initialize the submodules.
To compile with clang, run the following command:
./waf configure --target-configuration release
To compile with gcc, run the following command:
./waf configure --target-configuration release --toolset windows_x86-64_gcc
After configuration run ./waf to actually compile the project.
Install the following software:
- Python 3
- CMake
- Git for Windows (Any git client will work, this is just the most common one.)
- Visual Studio (Tested with VS2017 Community.)
- Make sure to select the C++ feature set, and make sure any Windows SDK is included.
This guide assumes you install your libraries into D:\MSVC$Configuration\ (e.g. Release), for the purpose of this guide we use a release configuration.
After installing the required software, download, GLFW.
Configure GLFW in RelWithDebInfo mode, and install it using cmake --build . --target install, as CMake doesn't copy the PDB, manually copy src\glfw3.pdb to D:\MSVC\Release\bin\.
Next download GLM, navigate to the source tree and copy the glm folder D:\MSVC\HeaderOnly\include.
Next up open an x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 201* (where * is either 7 or 9), and make sure the compiler can find our libraries by using the following commands:
This part assumes Python is installed in C:\Python36\, edit where necessary.
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Python36;D:\MSVC\Release\bin
set INCLUDE=%INCLUDE%;D:\MSVC\Release\include;D:\MSVC\HeaderOnly\include
set LIB=%LIB%;D:\MSVC\Release\lib
Now navigate to the source folder, and make sure to initialize and up the submodules.
Now we can compile using MSVC with the following commands:
python ./waf configure --target-configuration release --toolset windows_x86-64_msvc
python ./waf
Next run it by executing build/RayTracer from this directory.
After rendering has completed, a window will pop up showing the render, if configured.
In all configurations, the render will output to a png in the working directory.