MinRT

Project Objective: Create a Ray Tracer

For the project completion, several goals were defined, including:

• Rendering with multiple light sources
• Multiple geometric shapes such as spheres, planes, cylinders, triangles
• Shadow patterns
• Applying textures on spheres and 3D objects
• Applying bump textures
• Applying reflective properties to objects

How It Works

The functioning of a ray tracer is quite fun;

Basically, we have an object in space, like a sphere at (0,0,0),
and we need to know if the pixel on the screen we are checking is part of the sphere.
So we take the pixel, convert it into a point in space, add a direction,
and trace a ray in that direction. If it hits the sphere, that means we have to paint that pixel with the sphere’s color.

Simple, I know! If you want to understand the functioning in depth, there is the book we used as reference for this project, The Ray Tracer Challenge, which explains how to make a ray tracer.

What You Will Work on in This Project

• Matrix operations
• Point operations in space
• RGB color operations

These are the basic modules to start working on. Then we will:

• Use the previous modules to calculate intersections with objects in space (those annoying formulas you learned in math classes)
• Learn what a normal is and why it is important for lighting calculations on an object
• Then learn how reflection works on mirrors, which basically means using the previous two modules in a loop to calculate reflection points;
  At the end, put it all together to obtain a beautiful image (or a segfault!)

Now Let’s See Some Pictures

build the prject

git clone repo
cd repo
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xorg
sudo apt install libbsd-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev
git submodule update --init --recursive 
make