Golang Ray Tracer

A ray tracer written in Golang. Implemented with much help from the tremendous book by Jamis Buck, The Ray Tracer Challenge.

Advantages of using Go

• Easy concurrency. It's almost a necessity to use multithreading in a ray tracer in order to improve performance, and Go's sync.WaitGroup makes this very simple.
• Garbage collection. There are a LOT of objects created while the ray tracer is running, and having those cleaned up automatically is a great convenience.

Disadvantages of using Go

• Inheritance/polymorphism is hard. The object classes (shapes) in this ray tracer have a lot of common code, and are designed in such a way that polymorphism is required. I managed to make it work, but it isn't as pretty as it could be using an object-oriented language.

Building/Running

Pre-requisites:

• go 1.17 installed

make build builds the ray tracer binary.

Specify a scene file when running: ./gtracer --scene my-scene.yaml

Both YAML and JSON file types are supported. See the demo/ directory for some example scenes. The schema for the scene file can be viewed here.

Important Notes:

1. In a scene definition, children listed in either a group or csg need to be defined as a top level object (either as shape, file, group, or csg) in order to be properly referenced.
2. Child objects must be defined before their parents.
3. As of now, materials defined on a child within nested groups may not be honored. For best results, avoid nested groups and csgs.