Raytracer

Raytracer is a recursive raytracer I wrote for a school project. It features parallel ray tracing, recursive ray tracing, reflections, semitransparent materials, and refraction. It also uses a Bounding Volume Hierarchy in order to trace things faster. It's not quite as optimized as it theoretically could be, but it's decently fast, and makes good use of CPU cores.

Gallery

There's also a neat animated video made by tracing frames individually and then stitching them together with a script.

Building

Get Dependencies

You'll need libpng installed to output to PNGs. You'll also need a C++14-compatible compiler.

Compiling

Unpack the tar. Then, run this command.

make

Note that this will compile with -Ofast -march=native -flto, so the speed of compilation will be rather slow. Sorry.

If you have troubles, try running make clean first.

Running

Run this command:

./raytracer DRIVERFILE OUTFILE

Where DRIVERFILE is a path to a Driver File. Driver Files are described later on in this README, but an example can be found here. This code will output how much progress it's made every second or so, as a percentage. It will render the image into OUTFILE. This program uses the excellent CImg library to output pixel data. As a result, OUTFILE will smartly read the file type from the extension, and save the image with the appropriate type. I recommend the use of .png.

Features

This raytracer makes us of a bounding volume hierarchy, texture mapping, and smooth shading.

A bounding volume hierarchy is an acceleration data structure for raytracing. It essentially puts all the primitives inside nested boxes, then uses a smart traversal algorithm to test against a minimal number of boxes and primitives. There's a variety of ways to construct a tree of this sort. I use a lazy SAH, which basically finds the best surface area heuristic (the box with the smallest surface area) out of ten possible boxes, and uses that as a split. Despite being extremely lazy, this seems to work well in practice, and it drastically reduces the time to render large images (even if the startup cost is a bit higher now).

Texture Mapping is the process of applying textures to faces. I use the excellent CImg library to read the actual texture files. This requires linking in libpng, so make sure you have that available. I then use the wavefront UV coordinates to apply textures. This is fairly simple to do, but the code is in src/face.cpp if you want a look.

I also do smooth shading. This is the process of using the object's built-in vertex normals to smoothly shade the object based on where a ray hit, and is much nicer looking than simply finding the normal of the triangle! Unfortunately, this also means that objects without proper normals won't actually render, but all the models contained in this example do. If you would like to use this raytracer to render other things (possibly as part of grading), make sure the objects have valid normal information!

Example Renderings

All of the example renderings are located in custom_drivers. Copy the raytracer executable into that directory create them.

The first custom rendering is generated by custom_driver/driver01.txt Make it with:

make clean && make -j 16 && cp raytracer custom_drivers && cd custom_drivers && ./raytracer driver00.txt driver00-self-rendered.png

It demonstrates refraction by refracting light though several spheres onto a pretty rainbow surface.

The second custom driver, is located in custom_drivers/driver01.txt Make it by running:

make clean && make -j 16 && cp raytracer custom_drivers && cd custom_drivers && ./raytracer driver01.txt driver01-self-rendered.png

This file demonstrates texture mapping, smooth shading, refraction, and all the other features of my raytracer. It's also really large, so watch out for that. Some image viewers don't like images this big, so you may wish to modify the resolution down to 1600x900 or some similarly smaller resolution before viewing. Alternatively, resize the image with the convert command.

Getting Documentation

You can get extended documentation via Doxygen. Just run make docs to build the files.

Notes

• This program will chew up 100% of the CPU time as it runs in parallel with enough threads to keep every core busy. If the entire machine grinds to a halt while running it on a complex scene, this is probably why.
• This program assumes that we should use the only material in a .mtlib file for all faces if there is only one material in that file. It will otherwise perform colorization correctly, although it will pick a random material for any faces before the first usemtl line.
• In extremely rare cases, the BVH construction will hit a strange memory error and crash. I have no idea why this happens, but it should not occur on the provided driver files.