In an effort to learn about ray tracing, I decided to follow ssloy’s tinyraytracer tutorial which is, in my opinion, a very gentle introduction into the world of raytracing. Despite the tutorial using C++, I decided to use Rust for no reason except that I hadn’t written any Rust code in a while and felt a bit rusty (pun intended).

Another thing that I did differently from the tutorial is that I rendered to an SDL window instead of rendering to an image. This gave me the ability to have the camera be dynamic and move around freely in the scene.

Within a few days, I had already finished the tutorial and was ready to try adding more stuff. I started by adding some multithreading due to how trivially parallelizable a ray-tracer is. This noticeably decreased the frame time enough for the framerate to reach interactive rates at a low enough resolution (I unfortunately don’t have any benchmarks as I forgot to make them, but since the raytracer is already working it should be pretty easy to benchmark anything if the need arises).

I also added a couple of extra primitives:

• Disks (which were pretty trivial as I already had planes)
• Axis-aligned boxes (that could be used later for the BVH)

After that I planned to put a lot of extra features:

• Multisample Anti-aliasing
• Transformations
• UV mapping
• Triangle Meshes
• Denoising
• Acceleration Structure (BVH)
• Try pushing most of the work to the GPU (planned to use Vulkan compute shaders.)

However, since this was a beginner tutorial and this was my first time making a raytracer, I ended up with a program architecture that wouldn’t allow the addition of most of this stuff. So since I decided that this raytracer wouldn’t be my last, I kept these features for the next one.

Some Screenshots:

The source code for this raytracer can be found in this repository.