Introduction

Hi there!

This is a mini raytracer that renders a bunch of spheres! Nothing very fancy here.

We've provided the basic necessary structs and functions to implement

Test objective

The objective of this sample is to implement a raytracing acceleration structure (namely test_accelerator, which is to be located in the test_accelerator.h and test_accelerator.cpp)

test_accelerator inherits from accelerator, and you must implement the init and trace methods. A trivial implementation is provided as trivial_accelerator (in accelerator.h)

Your implementation should be fairly simple, easy to read, and should behave predictably relative to complexity.

You should not over-optimize, nor over-complexify.

Compiling

This sample is standalone (as it does not depend on external libraries) and should compile easily with any c++11 compiler.

Linux

A makefile is provided. A decently modern g++ will do (gcc 4.8 and above.) 'make' will compile in release mode (-O3 -DNDEBUG.) Compile in debug with 'make VERSION=debug' The release (resp. debug) executable is release/raytracer (resp. debug/raytracer)

Windows

A VS2015 solution is provided. Build the solution using the build menu.

As is, the test_accelerator does nothing and the resulting image is black. You may use the -t option to render the image using the trivial_accelerator implementation (warning: this is very slow.)

Running

The executable takes a few options:

• -w width to specify the width of the output image (default is 1024)
• -h height to specifiy the height of the output image (default is 1024)
• -o file to specify the output file name (default is out.ppm)
• -n nspheres to specify the number of spheres to render (default is 20000)
• -s scale to specify the scaling factor of the spheres (default is 0.5)
• -nt nthreads to specify the number of rendering threads (default is 1)
• -t to render using the trivial_accelerator