A very fast multithreaded ray tracer in C originally written for a school project.

C Ray Tracer is a very fast multithreaded ray tracer in C featuring a custom .scene file implementation, basic PPM file implementation, and recursive ray tracing with lighting, reflection, and three object primitives.

Details:

• .scene file implementation:
  • Custom file implementation
  • Basic format describing a 3D scene to render
  • Example .scene file
• PPM implementation:
  • Portable PixMap (.ppm)
  • ASCII and binary formats (P3 and P6 respectively)
• Ray tracing:
  • Features recursive ray tracing function with ray casting
  • Allows for reflection, lighting, and more (e.g., refraction)
  • 3 primitives:
    • Sphere
    • Plane
    • Quadric
  • Very fast
    • 5.2s to render input.scene at 10000x10000 on Apple MacBook Air (Late 2020) with Clang 16
    • OpenMP to easily utilize multithreading scalable to any system
    • Aggressive inlining to minimize function overhead
    • SIMD-friendly code

Some outputs from this ray tracer are shown below:

The following example was generated from a branched version with anaglyph support:

Find the code on GitHub here.