A simple CPU raytracer implementation based on the excellent "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" and "Ray Tracing: The Next Week" books by Peter Shirley (no seriously, you should read them).
After completing the books, I have expanded the software with the following features:
- Multithreading support (scalable to an unlimited number of threads)
- JSON-based scene files, instead of code-generated scenes
- A command-line interface to provide some configurable parameters to the renderer
- Display render progress and total time to complete
- PPM P6 binary encoding for more compact render outputs (instead of plain P3 ASCII encoding)
- A data-oriented rewrite of the raytracer, with additional optimizations, which is available on the
data-orientedbranch. This version runs ~10% faster than the original version from the book.
To build the project, clone the repository and open it in Visual Studio 2019 (with C++20 support enabled), from where it can be built and run without any additional configuration.
Command-line usage:
basic-raytracer.exe <scene> <output> <width> <height> [-s/--samples <value>] [-b/--bounces <value>] [-t/--threads <value>]