A simple raytracing program written in python.
I put together a minimal raytracing engine. It's based on this fantastic book, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
I needed to adapt the example code from C++ to Python. This was a great crash course in the language, because the book used a number of relatively advanced techniques. It was interesting to see what became easier in Python, and what became harder. Performance quickly became a limiting factor, and I needed to introduce multithreading just to be able to run tests in a reasonable amount of time.
The scene is configured by editing main.py.
Main has a number of comments explaining what variables are responsible for.
I encourage playing around with the scene to see if you can create something interesting, if you have time!
I had a lot of fun exploring the effects I could get with the reflective and refractive materials.
Right now, main is configured to produce the image seen at the top of the README.
It took about half an hour to render,
if you'd like to render a lower quality version faster,
just to make sure everything works,
try reducing numbers like
samples_per_pixel, max_depth, or the image dimensions.
For example, set samples_per_pixel = 5 for a fast but noisy preview,
or lower the resolution to 100x200 for a near instant render.
Make sure all dependencies are installed. My copy of Fedora came with all the libraries I needed, but if there are any missing on your computer, the runtime should let you know what you need anyway.
The program can be run via
python3.7 main.py
or even more simply
make
Note: my Makefile invokes Black (a strict PEP-8 linter) each time it's run, if you don't want the formatting of your edits to main.py to change, or if you don't want to install black, you can instead do make run.
When running, the program displays its progress.
Pixels are done using a pool of threads,
but each row is done in sequence.
The progress indicator tells how many rows have been completed.
When the program finishes, it will display the image in a window
and save a jpeg to the images directory (named after the time it was created).