This is a very basic toy ray tracer, written in C++. There's nothing special about this; it's the same as every other toy tracer written by every CS student at some point.

Many years ago I wrote a ray tracer in Java back when I was a student in University (see above), which was appallingly slow if instructive to figure out. This is a new implementation in modern C++.

Originally written while I was sick at home, after being inspired by Dylan Beattie's talk on making a Javascript ray tracer, which also has a great accompanying online handbook available.

Later improved with a better lighting model after reading the absolutely wonderful Raytracing in One Weekend free book series by Steve Hollasch.

This should be buildable under (at least) Windows and Linux.

You should be able to open the CMakelists.txt file as a CMake project in Visual Studio 2019 (or newer), then build from within the IDE.

Choosing the install option when right-clicking the top level CMakelists.txt in the Solution Explorer will generate a redistributable package on disk with all the required binaries and assets needed to run the program.

The SFML library dependency is vendored in the repository, and statically linked.

To build on Linux, install the cmake, build-essential, ninja-build and libsfml-dev packages from your distribution's package manager as prerequisites.

Once the prerequisites have been installed, build via:

cmake -B build/ -G "Ninja" .
cmake --build build

Released under the MIT license.