Ray Tracing

This is just a personal project for funsies.

I've recently been into computer graphics. I saw this project by ebkalderon, so I decided to take a shot at ray tracing in one weekend. I'm most likely not going to finish this in one weekend, but it's whatever (a learning experience).

I've finished RTIOW in two weekends (and the school days in between).

Running Examples

You can specify <example-name> with any example defined in Cargo.toml. If you want to see rendering progress, prefix the following with RUST_LOG=info.

  cargo run --example <example-name>

You can open PPM files on MacOS with magick output.ppm display:.

Things to Say

Initially, I wrote my Vector struct as generic as possible, employing a Numeric trait and supporting N-Vectors. Moreover, I couldn't even implement Copy, so simple arithmetic operations almost always ended up being horrible to write. I learned my lesson after like 5 chapters, when I was looking at other implementations of RTIOW in Rust: I was never going to need Vector<10, f64> or even Vector<3, f32>! Even doing this for completeness was stupid.

Even worse, I spent practically an entire day debugging and it all came down to initializing a vector with entries: Box::new([random(); 3]). random() got called once and I actually needed to use std::array::from_fn().

It wasn't after scrolling through another project (which finished the 3rd book) until I ended Vector<T, N>.

Part II: The Next Weekend

Well, technically it's the weekend after...

I might get working on this soon.

Goals:

• CLI (binary wrapper crate around ray tracing lib)
  • using a custom scene description language to express the world because regular configuration languages don't let you have required parameters
    • syntax highlighting + language server (inline hints)
• As an alternative to the CLI, I'm thinking of exposing a declarative macro scene! { .. } from the library crate itself.