advaypal/raytracer-rust

A raytracer in Rust

raytracer-rust's Issues

Alternate implementations for handling incident rays

Currently we instantiate a HitRecord struct whenever a ray hits a surface. This is created to store certain values when the event occurs.

Perhaps we can abstract the hitting event away to a method as part of the Hittable trait.

Intuitively hitting a surface should have a function causing a ray to reflect and other effects rather than creating any sort of struct.

Convert pixel ratios to RGB explicitly

We rely on the following implicit behaviour to keep the pixel values within bounds of 0 - 255.

Casting floats to int rounds the float to zero

eprintln!("{}", 255.999 as i32);

Output:

255

Consider ways to make this conversion explicit

Investigate if our image is being printed upside down

Upon executing cargo run > image.ppm,

1. We trace the ray starting from the lower left corner of our screen.
   We do so from left to right, bottom to top row.
   Suppose the bottom left corner as RGB value of 255 0 0.

2. Each time we trace, we print to stdout.

3. The output is piped to image.ppm.

4. The first RGB value written to image.ppm will be 255 0 0.
   This corresponds to the top left pixel in the image.ppm file.

   ppm specification

   (Pixels are rendered) in order from top to bottom. Each row consists of Width pixels, in order from left to right.

5. Following this reasoning, it seems our image is printed upside down.

Separating color from vector struct

Currently Color is an enum value of VectorType.

Perhaps we can model these separately since a Color is not a vector.

The book this project follows models it this way as well, maybe there's a good reason which I am unaware of.