Riley's Raytracer

Overview

This is a raytracer that I started in a graphics class during my final semester at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 2021. I've put a lot of work into this, so I'd like to showcase it for anyone who'd like to see it.

With guidance from our professor Stephen Guy, the students in this class spent three weeks creating raytracers. This is my implementation, which has grown since then and supports lots of different cool features, like

• Arbitrary camera position and direction
• Arbitrary spheres, triangles, circles, and ellipses with RGB colors
• Point lights, directional lights, spot lights, and ambient lights
• Ambient, diffuse, and specular (Blinn-Phong) lighting
• Interpolation of triangle normals for smooth lighting
• Shadows
• Reflections to a bounded depth
• A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) and parallelism with OpenMP for tracing acceleration
• PNG, JPG, BMP, and TGA output (with the stb_image_write library)
• Jittered supersampling (multiple samples per pixel for improved image quality)

Using the Raytracer

If you'd like to try out the raytracer yourself, this repository should contain most of what you need to get started. This project is built using cmake, so a machine with cmake installed is also necessary.

To build the code for the project, try the following on a bash terminal from the top-level repository directory (where this README is).

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -E env CXXFLAGS="-O3" cmake .. # turn on aggressive compiler optimization
make ray # depending on what system you're using, CMake may generate a Makefile or some other way to build the code
./ray scene_file.txt

This project was built and tested on Ubuntu 18.04, so I don't know exactly how it runs on different OSes or different versions of Linux (but it shouldn't have many issues between versions of Linux as far as I'm aware).

Some example scene files are in the scenes directory. These can be passed to the ray executable to be traced.

Examples

The images directory contains example images generated by this raytracer. Many of the scene files / models for these scenes were given to us by Dr. Guy. They do a good job of showing off various different features of the raytracer, like shadows, reflections, interesting camera angles, and so on. They also expose some bugs here and there. images/Refract contains example images for refraction, which I attempted but didn't get working correctly.

Some of my personal favorites are the watch images in images/Challenge. This watch is incredibly detailed. You can see the highest quality watch image above.

Here are some more highlights from the images directory.