Traci is written in Rust. To compile to an executable, you first need a working installation of the Rust and Cargo. Please visit the official Rust website for instructions. Then, to compile (with dependencies for math libraries, etc.), run the following command from the root of the project directory:
cargo run --release
Note: it it important to use the
--releaseflag to ensure that the project gets compiled with optimizations. This makes a very bug difference in runtime of the ray tracer.
This will fetch all dependencies, compile, and run the resulting binary (which is saved to target/release/traci). The output image is saved to images/out.png. The sample image shown on this README was rendered at full HD resolution with 1000 samples per pixel on an 8 core CPU. Rendering took just under 10 minutes.
The ray tracer implements the functionality in the project specification along with the following additional features:
- Multi-core parallelism for faster rendering
- Translucent multi-colored balls (i.e. refract light but are also colored)
An optional feature that can improve rendering time is the bouding volume hierarchy (BVH). This uses a tree-like data structure with bounding boxes to decrease the number of calld to the hit function. You can opt to use a BVH by simpy adding a call to the accelerate function no your Scence. Note that this may incur a performance penalty if your scene contains only asmall number of objects.
Here is quick comparison of the rendering times with and without the BVH.
| Number of Spheres | Render Time (BVH) | Render Time (no BVH) | Speed-Up Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 7.71 s | 16.34 s | 2.12 |
| 10,000 | 9.97 s | 105.06 s | 10.5 |
| 100,000 | 19.66 s | N/A (est. 26 m) | ~79.3 |
| 1,000,000 | 51.82 s | N/A (est. 05 h) | ~347 |
All experiements were run on a MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017) with the following hardware:
- Processor: 1.8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5
- Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB
[x] Commented code [x] Ray-Plane Intersection [x] Ray-Sphere Intersection [x] Ray-Triangle Intersection [x] Movable Camera [x] Orthographic and Perspective Projection [x] Multi-Jittered Sampling [x] Simple Diffuse Shading [x] Hard Shadows
[x] Import a Mesh [x] Per-vertex normals [x] Smooth shading [x] Construct BVH [x] BVH speedup [x] 10000 Spheres [x] 100000 Spheres [x] Technical Report