Rust Raytracer

Rust Raytracer is an implementation of a simple raytracer based on "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" by Peter Shirley. Developed to learn Rust from scratch, the project might not be perfectly idiomatic but it produces visually appealing results. Additional features beyond Shirley's course include texture mapping, lighting, parallel rendering, reading scene data from JSON, and rendering a sky texture.

The Rust Raytracer project was created to explore the fundamentals of ray tracing while learning the Rust programming language. It extends the basic implementation provided in Peter Shirley's "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" with several advanced features to enhance rendering capabilities.

• Texture Mapping: Apply textures to objects, such as earth and moon textures.
• Lighting: Simulate realistic lighting effects in the rendered scenes.
• Parallel Rendering: Utilize all CPU cores for improved performance.
• JSON Scene Data: Read scene configurations from a JSON file.
• Sky Texture Rendering: Render a sky texture for more immersive visuals.

Latest output

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/237355/147687883-4e9ca4fc-7c3b-4adb-85d7-6b08d1bc69f7.mp4

To build and run the raytracer, use the following commands:

$ cargo build --release
   Compiling raytracer v0.1.0 (/path/to/rust-raytracer/raytracer)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 2.57s
 
$ ./target/release/raytracer data/test_scene.json out.png
Rendering out.png
Frame time: 2840ms
 
$ ./target/release/raytracer data/cover_scene.json cover.png
Rendering cover.png
Frame time: 27146ms

cover_alt

lighting-recast-final

Parallel rendering significantly improves performance by utilizing multiple CPU cores.

Rendering anim/frame_000.png
............................................................
Frame time: 21s

Rendering anim/frame_000.png
Frame time: 2573ms

sky_textures

{
  "width": 800,
  "height": 600,
  "samples_per_pixel": 128,
  "max_depth": 50,
  "sky": {
    "texture": "data/beach.jpg"
  },
  "camera": {
    "look_from": { "x": -2.0, "y": 0.5, "z": 1.0 },
    "look_at": { "x": 0.0, "y": 0.0, "z": -1.0 },
    "vup": { "x": 0.0, "y": 1.0, "z": 0.0 },
    "vfov": 50.0,
    "aspect": 1.3333333333333333
  },
  "objects": [
    {
      "center": { "x": 0.0, "y": 0.0, "z": -1.0 },
      "radius": 0.5,
      "material": {
        "Texture": {
          "albedo": [1.0, 1.0, 1.0],
          "pixels": "data/earth.jpg",
          "width": 2048,
          "height": 1024,
          "h_offset": 0.75
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

To create an animation from rendered frames, use:

ffmpeg -f image2 -framerate 15 -i anim/frame_%03d.png -loop -0 anim.gif

• Earth and Moon Textures: From Solar System Scope

147705264-c6f439df-f61b-4bcf-b5e6-c2c755b35b1c

max_depth_anim