traycer

A ray tracer with Phong shading, supersampling, recursive reflections, and soft shadows.

spheres.scene	table.scene
10 jittered rays/pixel, 10 reflection bounces	5 jittered rays/pixel, 10 extra lights/light (for producing soft shadows)

Features

• Ray-surface intersections with the following surfaces:
  • Triangles
  • Spheres
• Anti-aliasing via jittered supersampling
• Phong shading
• Recursive reflection
• Soft shadows

Build Requirements

• Operating system: macOS or Linux
• C++ compiler supporting at least C++17
• CMake >= 3.2
• OpenGL >= 3.2

My development environment and tooling:

• Hardware: MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)
• Operating system: macOS Mojave == 10.14.16
• C++ compiler: Clang == 10.0.01
• CMake == 3.25.1
• OpenGL == 4.1

I built traycer on a Linux machine as well:

• Operating system: Debian == 11.7
• C++ compiler: gcc == 10.2.1
• CMake == 3.26.3
• OpenGL == 4.5

Build Steps

The build system must be generated before the project can be built. From the project directory, generate the build system:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release ..

The -G option is omitted in cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release .., so CMake will choose a default build system generator type based on your platform. To learn more about generators, see the CMake docs.

After having generated the build system, go back to the project directory:

cd ..

Build all the targets of the project:

cmake --build build --config Release

The built targets are placed in the directory build. There is only one executable target: traycer.

Usage

./build/traycer [options...] <scene-file>

Options:

• --jitter <number-of-rays-per-pixel>
  • Enables supersampling via jittering if option argument is greater than 0.
  • The default option argument is 0.
• --bounces <number-of-reflection-bounces>
  • The depth of reflection recursion.
  • The default option argument is 0.
• --soft-shadows <number-of-extra-lights-per-light>
  • Soft shadows are applied if option argument is greater than 0.
  • The default option argument is 0.
• --render-to-file <filepath>
  • Rendered image will be written to a JPEG file at the path provided.

To exit the program, have the window in focus and press ESC. You can also terminate the program by pressing CTRL + C in the terminal.

The scenes directory contains example scene files.

Example

./build/traycer --jitter 10 --bounces 5 --soft-shadows 5 --render-to-file scene.jpg scenes/spheres.scene