Ray Tracer (RT)

A physically-based ray tracing renderer written in Rust that simulates realistic light behavior and generates photorealistic images.

📋 Table of Contents

• Ray Tracer (RT)
  • 🎨 About
  • ✨ Features
  • 🚀 Installation
    • Prerequisites
    • Setup
  • 💻 Usage
    • Basic Usage
    • Custom Scene
  • 🎬 Scene Configuration
    • Camera
    • Light
    • Objects
  • 📸 Examples
  • 📚 Documentation
  • 📁 Project Structure
  • 🛠️ Dependencies
  • 🤝 Contributing

🎨 About

This ray tracer implements a rendering technique that simulates the physical behavior of light as it interacts with objects in a 3D scene. By tracing rays of light from a virtual camera through each pixel, the renderer calculates realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections to produce high-quality images.

✨ Features

• Multiple Primitive Types

  • Spheres
  • Planes
  • Cubes
  • Cylinders

• Realistic Lighting

  • Point light sources with configurable intensity
  • Color-tinted lighting
  • Shadow casting

• Flexible Camera System

  • Configurable camera position and orientation
  • Look-at target positioning

• JSON-based Scene Definition

  • Easy scene configuration
  • Hot-swappable scene files
  • Human-readable format

• PPM Image Output

  • Standard image format output
  • Configurable resolution

🚀 Installation

Prerequisites

• Rust (latest stable version)
• Cargo (comes with Rust)

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd rt

2. Build the project:

   cargo build --release

💻 Usage

Basic Usage

Run the ray tracer with the default scene configuration:

cargo run --release

This will:

1. Read the scene configuration from scene.json
2. Render the scene
3. Generate a PPM image file as output

Custom Scene

Modify the scene.json file to create your own custom scenes. See the Scene Configuration section for details.

🎬 Scene Configuration

The scene.json file defines all elements of your 3D scene. It uses a JSON structure with the following components:

Camera

Defines the viewpoint and orientation:

"camera": {
    "origin": { "e": [3.0, 2.2, -4.0] },
    "look_at": { "e": [2.0, 0.0, 0.0] }
}

Light

Configures the light source:

"light": {
    "position": { "e": [2.0, 6.0, -4.0] },
    "color": { "e": [1.0, 1.0, 1.0] },
    "intensity": 1.0
}

Objects

Add various geometric primitives to your scene:

"spheres": [...],
"planes": [...],
"cubes": [...],
"cylinders": [...]

For detailed information about all configuration options, see the documentation.

📸 Examples

Here's an example of a rendered scene:

📚 Documentation

For comprehensive documentation on:

• Ray tracing concepts
• Detailed JSON schema
• Object properties and parameters
• Color specifications

Please refer to the documentation.md file.

📁 Project Structure

rt/
├── src/
│   ├── main.rs           # Entry point
│   ├── camera.rs         # Camera implementation
│   ├── color.rs          # Color utilities
│   ├── ray.rs            # Ray mathematics
│   ├── hittable.rs       # Hit detection trait
│   ├── hittable_list.rs  # Collection of hittable objects
│   ├── sphere.rs         # Sphere primitive
│   ├── plane.rs          # Plane primitive
│   ├── cube.rs           # Cube primitive
│   ├── cylinder.rs       # Cylinder primitive
│   ├── light.rs          # Lighting calculations
│   ├── vec3.rs           # 3D vector mathematics
│   ├── output.rs         # Image generation
│   ├── param.rs          # Parameters
│   └── common.rs         # Common utilities
├── scene.json            # Scene configuration
├── documentation.md      # Detailed documentation
├── Cargo.toml           # Rust dependencies
└── README.md            # This file

🛠️ Dependencies

• rand (0.8.5) - Random number generation
• serde (1.0.215) - Serialization framework
• serde_json (1.0.133) - JSON parsing

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

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