Ray Tracing in One (Many) Weekend(s) (and more)

C# implementation of Peter Shirley's excellent free books on ray and path tracing with some own additions. Take me to the books! Updated to reflect version 4 of the book.

changes to previous iteration:

• Replaced custom Vec3/Point3 implementations with the System.Numerics Vector3 variants
• json scene file format instead of hard coding scenes
• 3rd party image library instead of self made, easier to support texture files in different formats
• requires .NET 8 and uses C# 12 features. Although the latter very sparsely, for now.

ideas for future boredom:

• add (back in again) CSG through signed distance trickery
• experimental tree structures (i.e. swap bvh to kd tree at scene file level)
• some ui to see render progress (web ui with live updates through websockets for example)

Fovea is the name i usually pick for all of my hobbyist rendering adventures, from Fovea centralis.

In addition to the books

• more general instancing support through transformation matrices
• cylinders and disks, because why not
• slightly more fancy BVH, IIRC based on the (also excellent) PBR Book, using a SAH approach with binning
• Bounding box intersection with SSE Instructions, might not be the best, but it is faster than the regular method
• triangle (mesh) support, either as standalone triangles or as a mesh
• a json scene file parser

With dotnet 8 sdk installed, run either one of the contained scene files or look at the parameters (which basically override scene settings related to render speed and image sized)

• dotnet run --project .\Fovea.CmdLine\ -c Release -- --help
• dotnet run --project .\Fovea.CmdLine\ -c Release -- -s .\scenes\finalSceneBookOne.json (or any other scene file)

There is also a scene writer, which allows you to write out programmatically generated scenes into json. See Fovea.SceneWriter directory.

Fancy picture time (time measurements on a Ryzen 5 2600, 10k samples, 640x480)

Teapot mesh with interpolated normals. The whole scene is enclosed with a sphere with a forest scene texture used for lighting. (505.52 seconds)

Cylinder Demo with some textures

the final image of book 3 (877.98 seconds) (noticeable defects, will fix those...)

the final image of book 2 (2113.06 seconds)