raytrace-ruby

Ruby raytracer

Written in Ruby 2.6 thanks largely to the book Ray Tracing in One Weekend by Peter Shirley.

Outputs to .ppm format (you'll need something like GIMP to view the files). There is a sample sample.ppm in the images directory. Default render size is 400px x 266px. Larger is possible, but it'll take a looooooong time. The above image took about 6 hours to render. For those keeping track at home, that's a very respectable 55 frames per second fortnight!

1 frame   24 hours     14 days 
------- x -------- x ----------- = 55.99 frames / fortnight
6 hours    1  day    1 fortnight

For each pixel, 100 light rays are fired from the source and can bounce off of an object a maximum of 50 times. For this render (400px x 266px) this means there's a theoretical maximum 532,000,000 ray bounces calculated.

Screenshots

Development, In Screenshots

If you want to follow along with trial-and-error for this project, screenshots in the assets directory are prefixed with a and b.

• a screenshots represent development milestones (i.e. I rendered my first circle, I added antialiasing, etc.).

• b screenshots represent setbacks or funny things I ran across while working (i.e. I tweaked a setting and now it's all broken!).

Each screenshot has a number representing a milestone. For instance, for my first render, screenshot a01 is the development milestone and b01 was the worst setback I encountered in the session.

The Good	The Bad
	Nothing really went wrong this time :(

Generate Your Own:

Clone this repository, then:

ruby main.rb

Next, you'll probably want to grab a coffee (or six) and reflect on this meme while you wait.

When you're done, it'll have generated a new timestamped render in the images directory.

Known Issues:

• If you're following along with the tutorial from the book, the trick to use a negative radius make a hollow dielectric sphere may not work.
  • See this image for an example of what my render looked like.
  • Everything else about dielectrics seems like it works fine?
  • (UPDATE) -- It appears this is now working with fixes to the hit order bug.

Contact

Tyler Porter

tyler.b.porter@gmail.com