ptruser/c-ray

C-Ray is a small, simple path tracer written in C

Example renders

(2500 samples, 2560x1600, 512 max bounces, 1h 22min)

(1000 samples, 1920x1080, 512 max bounces, 1h 23min, scene by Scott Graham)

Status

Synopsis

C-ray is a research oriented, physically accurate rendering engine built for learning. The source code is intended to be readable wherever possible, so feel free to explore and perhaps even expand upon the current functionality. See the contributing section in the wiki for more details.

C-ray currently has:

• A simple unidirectional unbiased integrator
• Real-time render preview using SDL
• Easy scene compositing using JSON
• Multithreading (pthreads and WIN32 threads)
• OBJ loading with transforms for compositing a scene
• PNG and BMP file output
• k-d tree acceleration structure for fast intersection checks even with millions of primitives
• Antialiasing
• Multi-sampling
• HDR environment maps for realistic lighting
• Gouraud interpolated smooth shading
• Benchmarking metrics

The default integrator supports:

• metal
• glass
• lambertian diffuse
• plastic
• triangles and spheres
• Depth of field
• Russian Roulette path optimization
• Diffuse textures

Things I'm looking to implement:

• Built a more robust API with a scene state.
• Some procedural textures
• Python API wrapper
• Better materials
• Networking and clustered rendering
• Volumetric rendering
• Subsurface scattering
• Spectral rendering

Compatibility

C-ray has been verified to work on the following architectures

• x86 & x86_64 (Primarily developed on x86_64)
• ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8 (Various Raspberry Pi systems)
• PowerPC 7xx and 74xx (PowerPC G3 and G4 systems)
• MIPS R5000 (1996 SGI O2)
• SuperSPARC II (1992 SUN SparcStation 10)

Usage

Please see the Wiki for details on how to use the JSON scene interface!

Dependencies

• CMake for the build system
• SDL2 (Optional, CMake will link and enable it if it is found on your system.)
• Python3 (Optional, it's used for some utility scripts)
• Standard C99/GNU99 with some standard libraries

All other libraries are included as source

Installation

macOS: Either follow these instructions, or the instructions for Linux below. Both work fine.

1. Install SDL2 (See installing SDL below)
2. Open the .xcodeproj file in Xcode
3. Edit scheme by clicking C-Ray in top left, make sure 'Use custom working directory' is ticked and set it to the root directory of this project.
4. Go into the Arguments tab, and add by clicking +. Type in ./input/scene.json, then click close
5. Uncomment the UI_ENABLED define at the top of src/includes.h if you have SDL2 installed.
6. Build&Run with CMD+R

Linux:

1. (Optional) Install SDL2 (See installing SDL below)
2. Run cmake ., or optionally cmake . -DNO_SDL2=True to disable SDL2.
3. Run make to build the project
4. Run binary: ./bin/c-ray ./input/scene.json (Making sure the working dir is the root directory). You can also pipe files into C-ray and it will read from there. This is useful for scripts that invoke C-ray. Example: cat input/scene.json | ./bin/c-ray

Windows:

1. Download SDL2 Development libaries from here and extract: https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php (https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-devel-2.0.8-VC.zip)
2. Open a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt and set path to SDL2DIR (where you extracted the files to, should have a few folders like 'include' and 'lib'): set SDL2DIR=E:\sdl2\SDL2-devel-2.0.8-VC\SDL2-2.0.8
3. Run cmake: cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" .
4. (Optional) Edit src\includes.h to uncomment #define UI_ENABLED and copy your SDL2.dll into bin\Release\
5. Build the generated solution: msbuild c-ray.sln /p:Configuration=Release
6. Run: bin\Release\c-ray.exe input\scene.json or type input\scene.json | bin\Release\c-ray.exe

Installing SDL

On macOS, use homebrew to install SDL. brew install sdl2

On Windows, download from https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-devel-2.0.8-VC.zip

On Linux using APT, run sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

Writing your own raytracing algorithm

See writing your own rayTrace()

Tests

No tests yet! Maybe soon!

Credits

3rd party libraries included in this project

OBJ Loader library: http://www.kixor.net/dev/objloader/

lodePNG PNG compression library: http://lodev.org/lodepng/

stb_image.h by Sean Barrett: https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h

SDL2: https://www.libsdl.org/index.php (Optional)

JSON parsing library: https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON

PCG random number generator: http://www.pcg-random.org

Contributors

Please file an issue detailing any improvements you're planning on making. I openly welcome contributions!

You can also ping me on Discord: vkoskiv#3100