simple-cpp-raytracer

Authors: Doruk Coşkun (/Doruk-Coskun) & Çağrı Eser (/cagries)

This is a simple, MIT-licensed multi-threaded ray tracer written in C++14.

Requirements

simple-cpp-raytracer requires the CMake (version >= 3.0.2) build system. Head on to cmake.org to download it.

Additionally, the following libraries are downloaded and used while building the project:

• The tinyxml2 library for parsing scene files.

• The lodepng library for outputing PNG images.

• The header-only cxxopts library for parsing command line arguments.

Quick Start

Download the repository and its submodules by running

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/cagries/simple-cpp-raytracer.git

To build the project, run the following commands from the project root directory:

$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make 

This creates the raytracer executable inside the bin directory.

After choosing a scene file, you can run

$ cd ../bin/
$ ./raytracer <scene_file.xml>

to generate output images for each camera defined in the given scene file.

An example set of scene files (in XML) can be found within the scenes directory. Currently, exporting to the PNG and PPM formats is possible. You can specify the output file name and extension with the <ImageName></ImageName> tag inside the XML scene file.

Testing

simple-cpp-raytracer uses the Google Test framework for testing. Setting the RT_BUILD_TESTS flag while using CMake will download it while configuring the build.

If you want to build the tests and execute them locally, run the following (from the project root directory):

$ cd build/
$ cmake -DRT_BUILD_TESTS=1 ../
$ make
$ make test

Installation

To install the raytracer executable, libRaytracer.a static library and header files, run:

$ cd build/
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ sudo make install

The last step command assumes you are installing to a restricted directory. Assuming the default installation prefix of /usr/local/ (which you can change using the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your/target/directory/ option), the targets will be installed to:

• raytracer -> /usr/local/bin/raytracer

• libRaytracer.a -> /usr/local/lib/raytracer/libRaytracer.a

• Public header files -> inside /usr/local/include/raytracer/

Components

A minimal set of

• Cameras, image planes, 3-dimensional vectors

• Ambient lighting and point lights

• An extensible abstract Surface class, and basic derived Sphere, Triangle and Mesh classes.

• Shading models

  • Ambient shading
  • Diffuse shading
  • Blinn-Phong shading

• Shadows

• Reflective surfaces and ideal specular reflection

• Simple graphics data structures

  • Indexed triangle meshes
  • Basic bounding box

are provided by the base library. Feel free to extend it in any way that you desire.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! Check out the issue tracker and feel free to open pull requests for your changes.

Other Examples