Rustracer

Rustracer is a toy raytracer written in Rust.

History

It started as a little playground to play with raytracing concepts that I found on Scratchapixel. I then found out about tray_rust and began refactoring my code to follow its design, but then eventually bought a copy of Physically-Based Ray Tracing and decided to follow the C++ implementation as closely as possible to make it easier to follow along with the book. Consider this a port of PBRTv3 to Rust.

Note: I am very much a beginner in Rust as well as in raytracing and this project is a way for me to learn about both. If the code is ugly or broken, it is very much my fault :) This is not helped by the fact that the C++ implementation is very object-oriented, and doesn't always translate cleanly or idiomatically to Rust... I haven't really paid attention to performance yet, or number of allocations, so both are probably pretty bad :) That being said, feedback is more than welcome!

The code is on Bitbucket and mirrored on Github for convenience.

Related projects

• tray_rust: if you want to see a good physically-based raytracer in Rust written by someone who knows what they're talking about, you should check this project instead of mine :) It's got some nice features, like distributed rendering, and the code is beautifully written and documented.

• rs_pbrt: another port of PBRT to Rust.

Examples

More examples can be found in the renders/ directory.

How to build

Rustracer depends on Rust nightly, due to some dependencies that require it (in particular light_arena). The easiest way is to install rustup, then do rustup default nightly.

To run the CLI, run cargo run --release -p rustracer -- scene_file.pbrt.

Currently supported

• Integrators:
  • Whitted
  • Direct Lighting (with "all" or "one" sampling strategies)
  • Path Tracing (with "uniform" or "spatial" sampling strategies)
  • Normal (for debuging)
  • Ambient Occlusion
• Shapes:
  • Basic shapes: disc, sphere, cylinder
  • triangle meshes
• Perspective camera with thin-lens depth-of-field
• Lights:
  • Point lights
  • distant lights
  • diffuse area lights
  • infinite area light
• BxDFs:
  • Lambertian
  • perfect specular reflection / transmission
  • microfacet (Oren-Nayar and Torrance-Sparrow models, Beckmann and Trowbridge-Heitz distributions, Smith masking-shadowing function)
• Materials:
  • Matte
  • Plastic
  • Metal / RoughMetal
  • Glass / RoughGlass
  • Substrate (thin-coated)
  • Translucent
  • Uber
  • Disney (without SSS)
• Textures (imagemaps, UV, CheckerBoard)
  • imagemap with mipmapping (with trilinear and EWA filtering)
  • UV
  • CheckerBoard
  • Fbm
• BVH acceleration structure (MIDDLE and SAH splitting strategy)
• multi-threaded rendering
• Support for PBRT scene file format (still incomplete)
• Read textures in PNG, TGA, PFM, HDR or EXR (thanks to openexr-rs)
• Write images in PNG or EXR
• Support for PLY meshes (thanks to ply-rs)
• Bump mapping
• Memory arena (thanks to light_arena)

TODO

• More CLI parameters (e.g. output file name, thread numbers)
• More camera types (orthographic, realistic, environment)
• More shapes (cone, paraboloid, hyperboloid, NURBs...)
• More samplers (Halton, Sobol...)
• More BxDFs and materials
• Implement subsurface scattering
• Volumetric rendering
• More integrators: bidirectional path tracing, MTL, SPPM
• Animations
• more light types
• k-d trees?
• Spectral rendering?
• some SIMD optimisation?
• ...

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.