Ray Tracer

This repository is just me working through the exercises in "The Ray Tracer Challenge" by Jamis Buck.

Quite a bit of it is just me trying to get better at Rust.

Getting started

Start off by cloning the repo. You'll also need a version of Rust and Cargo (consider using rustup to install this).

Running tests

To run the unit tests and the end to end tests.

cargo test

If one of the end to end tests produces a different result from the reference image in the tests/fixtures directory the result will be written into the root of the project directory. The mechanism can be use for rendering higher resolution version of the scenes in the tests by changing the SCALE constant at the top of the test then running the test.

Gallery

These are some of the scenes the ray tracer can render. The size of these images are small because these images are used as fixtures that tests use to compare to the results they generate and smaller images are faster to render.

The basics

Name	Image
Simple Circle
Simple Sphere
Translated Sphere

Patterns

Name	Image
Checkered Sphere
Gradient Sphere
Ring Sphere
Stripe Sphere

Worlds

Name	Image
World floor
Simple World
World with non reflective checkered floor
World with reflective checkered floor
World with reflective floor
World with reflective floor and spheres
World glass sphere

Running benchmarks

This project contains benchmarks which measure the performance and allow you to compare how quickly the ray tracer is able to render scenes.

cargo bench

This will output something like:

render simple world     time:   [48.247 ms 48.335 ms 48.427 ms]
                        change: [-1.7688% -1.3561% -0.9619%] (p = 0.00 < 0.05)
                        Change within noise threshold.
Found 1 outliers among 100 measurements (1.00%)
  1 (1.00%) high severe

This will compare a bench mark to the previous results. This allows you to make a change that you expect to improve performance and know if it worked on not.

Possible improvements

• Add multiple light sources (note for this on 138 of the book).
• Builder interface for shapes.
• Update setting of transformation matrices
• Add a file input method for world description
• Create animated gifs