RayTracing

This is a ray tracing project implemented in C++ with a GUI. It is heavily inspired by Ray Tracing in One Weekend. I can not recommend the books enough.

It is a CMake project and should be easy to build on any platform. It has been tested on Windows and Linux.

The preferred compiler is clang++ as it seems to generate the best code.

Dependencies

The package manager of choice is vcpkg. If VCPKG_ROOT is set, the cmake-debug and cmake-release cmake profiles will automatically resolve dependencies.

The dependencies are:

• SFML for the GUI to display the image while it is being rendered.
• stb to write the rendered image to a PNG file.

Building

To build the project, run the following commands:

On Windows (PowerShell, Visual Studio Terminal):

cmake --preset cmake-release
cmake --build --preset cmake-release --config Release

On a Debian like system:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install git gcc g++ zip unzip wget clang cmake build-essential curl tar pkg-config libx11-dev libxi-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libudev-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
git clone https://github.com/amuhak/RayTracing.git
cd vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
export VCPKG_ROOT=$(pwd)
cd ../RayTracing/
cmake --preset cmake-release -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++ -DCMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/make
cmake --build --preset cmake-release --config Release -j
./cmake-release/RayTracing

Configurations for the GUI and headless rendering are available in camera.cpp. NOTE: the GUI does not work well with WSL. Turn it off (USE_DISPLAY must be set to false).