boundlesscarrot / simple-raytracer

A by-hand zig translation of the famous business card raytracer, originally written in C.

simple-raytracer

A simple translation of the famous business card raytracer

You can also render custom messages by generating the bit vectors from ascii art using the included python script.

Take note of the number of columns and rows it tells you your message has, you'll need to change:

• The NUM_LINES constant to the "number of lines" value
• The NUM_COLUMNS constant to the "number of columns" value
• The contents of the sphere_positions array with the contents of the "Bit vector" array from the script.

Note that the bigger your message the longer the rendering is going to take, and it already takes a while as is :)

Usage

1. Put your ascii art into the python script and run it with python3 bit_vector_creator.py
2. Get your sphere_positions, NUM_COLUMNS, and NUM_LINES from the python script output and place them into the relevant zig variables
   • You can create your own art here
3. Run with zig build-exe raytracer.zig && ./raytracer > img.ppm
   • You can also use the -O ReleaseFast or -O ReleaseSafe flags to speed up the execution
4. Then, with imagemagick installed, run convert img.ppm img.png to convert the image to a png format

Sources

• [0] Original source
• [1] Explaining some vars

simple-raytracer's Issues

Uncentered graphics

When rendering, the resulting image has all elements pushed to the extreme right of the image:

I think this is due to the number of bits in zigs usize type and the bit vectorizer not accounting for that. I attempted something that would center the bit vectors in a length of 64 but that didn't really work: