RaytraCer is a C implementation (with few extras/changes) of the awesome Raytracer created by Peter Shirley in his series _Ray Tracing in One Weekend_ .
My changes are mainly workaround/adaptation for the absence of inheritance in C, and the Output format since the original used .PPM, while this is perfectly fine for that scope, I wanted a more standard and efficent format, so I choose .PNG with the help of the stb_image_write.h library.
Another change is the addition of multithreading processing obtained with the help of OpenMP macro.
Since the main series was divided in 3 section, I kept the 3 stages of the code in the repository. Check the folder BasicTracer and AdvancedTracer to see the first and second stage of the project. The code in src is the final version of the raytracer.
The goal for this project, other than an extraordinary excercise with C and a great learning experience abour 3D Raytracing, is to integrate this as part of my Lisp dialect Gisp and use it to generate 3D render of scenes created live on it.
- Improve multithreading support, right now the OpenMP macro is fine, but I’d like to dig deeper in it.
- Try porting the code to run on the GPU
- Add more shapes and hittable objects
- Add more predefined materials and textures
On my desktop 6 core CPU the latest version of the raytracer renders the cornellbox-like scene below at 1024x1024 resolution with 512 samples (rays casted) per pixel in around 4 minutes.
These are other examples with the other version of the raytracer:
