Illuminate

A raytracer built using F#. The renderer will be based upon a variety of works, research papers, and websites but primary references include:

1. PBRT
2. Raytracing in One Weekend
3. Scratch a Pixel

Building & Running

Illuminate was developed using VSCode. In order to run the raytracer you will need dotnet core 2.2+ installed. The command line will work for most actions, but there is work to reference in .vscode/tasks.json to make development easier.

Building

dotnet restore && dotnet build

Testing

dotnet test

Unit testing is minimal to date, but will improve over time. There are integration tests as well that are more useful to ensure non breaking changes to the raytracing algorithm.

Run

Utilize the run task available from VSCode or run:

dotnet run --project illuminate.console -- ./meta/scenes/main.json ./meta/images/output.jpeg

The command line will take two arguments. The first argument will define the path to a scene file and the second argument will define the output path to a file. Currenty the raytracer only supports JPEG images for output. ./meta/scenes/main.json is the default option if no input parameters are defined. The output will write a timestamped image to the images folder.

Scene Definition

The following is a sample scene file to be used as reference. Currently it is self explanatory, but will eventually need to expound upon this format.

{
  "width": 640,
  "height": 480,
  "fov": 90,
  "shapes": [{
      "Sphere": {
        "origin": {
          "x": 4,
          "y": 0,
          "z": -10
        },
        "radius": 4,
        "color": {
          "r": 0,
          "g": 0,
          "b": 255
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sphere": {
        "origin": {
          "x": -4,
          "y": 0,
          "z": -5
        },
        "radius": 1,
        "color": {
          "r": 255,
          "g": 0,
          "b": 0
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "lights": [{
      "PointLight": {
        "origin": {
          "x": -8,
          "y": 0,
          "z": -2
        },
        "luminosity": {
          "r": 255,
          "g": 255,
          "b": 255
        },
        "intensity": 1
      }
    }
  ],
  "camera": {
    "x": 0,
    "y": 0,
    "z": 0
  }
}

Publishing & Versioning

Illuminate follows a loose interpretation of SemVar. Currently every tag will increment the minor version. Major and Patch are not utilized to date, but will eventually upon a 1.0.0 release.

Illuminate has a manual versioning increment policy, but the physical publishing uses a script publish.sh that makes publishing the latest version a simpler process. The intent is to commit the primary scene and image generated by the raytracer at that time and then increment the minor version number. The script will create a release folder for the 0.x.0 tag and then perform the necessary commands to create the tag and push to GitHub.