A HTML 5 based raytracer written in CoffeeScript. It's a little project done mainly for fun and learning CoffeeScript, and to play around with a raytracing implementation.
I'm currently working on a CUDA-based raytracer for a course at my university. Using a scripting language is perfect for experimentation and exploring the general concepts, in preparation for the "real" implementation. Also, HTML 5 provides a very convenient environment for displaying rendered images and manipulating input parameters. Finally, I'd like to see how well modern JS engines can cope with such a computationally intensive task, and how much performance I can squeeze out of it ;)
Generated images are blitted onto a 2D canvas. Currently supported:
- Sphere, plane and triangle primitives
- Point lights
- Phong shading
- Hard shadows
There are no reflections/refractions (yet), no anti-aliasing, and no fancy stuff like depth-of-field etc.
I'm using my own python based "build tool" at the moment. build-order.txt contains a list of all CoffeeScript source files.
Dependencies are reflected by the order of entries in that file. E.g., point3d.coffee is listed before ray.coffee, because
the Ray class depends on the Point3D class.
Running build.py invokes the coffee command on all files specified there, and produces a single web/coffee-ray.js file.
So new source files should be added to build-order.txt.
Run the build script (as described above) and open web/coffee-ray.html in your browser of choice.