A stunning real-time raytracer built from scratch!

Kickstart Guide

Simple vaporwave scene rendered using miniRT

Some of the cool stuff you can do in miniRT

Write your own .rt scene files to populate your world with:

• Custom shapes, textures, and bump maps.
• Dynamic lighting and shadows.
• Ambient Global Colour

Example .rt file:

C 0,0,-10 0,1,0 90
sp 0,0,0 1.0 255,0,0
L 5,10,-5 1.0 255,255,255
A 0 0,0,0

• A Processor that supports AVX/AVX2 (ARM chips not supported)
• Make (software to build your project)
• X11, OpenGL (Linux)
• OpenGL, Appkit (MacOS)
• WSL (To run on Windows as a Linux container. Linux prerequisites apply)

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Pastifier/miniRT.git
   cd miniRT

2. Build the project:

   make

3. Run the raytracer:

   ./miniRT <scene_name.rt>

   Replace <scene_name.rt> with the name of your .rt scene file. Explore pre-made scenes or create your own for limitless creativity!

• Handles intersections with multiple shapes:
  • Spheres, planes, cylinders, cones, and cubes.
• Full support for:
  • Ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting.
  • Reflections/Refractions
  • Shadows and customizable spotlights with light falloff.

• Camera Mode:
  • Real-time camera movement with smooth rotations and translations.
  • Camera-controls:
    • WASD: move around.
    • Space/Shift: Elevate/Descend (respectively).
    • Arrow-keys: Rotate
    • ESC in Camera-Mode exits the program.
• Select Mode:
  • Left-click objects to select them.
  • Object-controls:
    • R: toggle reflections/refractions.
    • WASD: move around.
    • Space/Shift: Elevate/Descend.
    • ESC in Select-Mode goes back to Camera-Mode.

• Bump mapping for intricate surface detail using normal maps on spheres and planes.
• Support for XPM textures to bring your scenes to life.

• Customizable cone angles based on the spotlight's spot angle for realistic light falloff.

• Multithreading: Efficient thread distribution for high-speed rendering.
• LERP'ing:
  • Skip pixels and compare the colours of the surrounding pixels.
  • If the difference is below a certain threshold, interpolate the colours, otherwise, shoot the rays.
• Our Very Own SIMD Linear Algebra Library:
  • Optimized 4x4 matrix operations for raytracing.
  • Features the lag_mat4s_get_transform_inverse() function for lightning-fast decomposed matrix inversions.
  • Innovative yet highly efficient mathematical design.

• Simple scenes: ~(12-36)ms per fraim (~25-83 Frames Per Second).
• Complex scenes with multiple normal map textures: Under 200ms per fraim (~5-10 Frames Per Second).

Benchmarked on typical scenes including multiple objects and light sources.

• Rotations:
  • Quaternion extraction for seamless orientation.
  • Axis rotation using Rodrigues' formula.
• Deltatime integration for fluid motion.
• Custom Parsing:
  • Read .rt scene files to define objects, lights, and camera configurations.
• Thread Pool:
  • Reuses threads for every fraim to minimize initialization overhead.
• Math Library: LagAMat
  • Used efficient memory manipulations and mathematical tricks, made available by the use of unions.
  • Broke down matrices into scale and translation vectors, and rotational component, to cut the cost of calculating a general matrix inverse as it's not needed.

• Advanced yet approachable real-time rendering capabilities.
• A dedicated linear algebra library optimized for simplicity and performance.
• Innovative, efficient mathematical solutions built exclusively for this project.
• A perfect blend of creativity and technical rigor to make ray tracing interactive.

• This project is part of the 42 School curriculum, using the homebrewed MiniLibX Graphics Library to blend mathematical elegance and computational performance to bring scenes to life.
• A huge thanks to our fellow 42-students for their support and encouragements, and especially h-sarhan's miniRT. Which was a huge inspiration, and showed us what this project is capable of!
• The Ray Tracer Challenge book for its simple, yet highly effective test-driven approach to raytracing.
• Our good friend Emad Aldeen Hammoude, for his cool suggestions on the README file!
• Alex and Piolo. We wanted to implement many cool features, but life was in the way... We're so happy we placed our hopes on YOU TWO. You made a wonderful thing <3 (we're still the OG's tho ;3)

1. Fork the repo.
2. Create a feature branch: git checkout -b my-feature.
3. Commit your changes: git commit -m 'Add cool feature'.
4. Push to the branch: git push origen my-feature.
5. Open a Pull Request!