Raytracer

A relatively simple ray tracer utilising Haskell's parallelization strategies to render simple scenes composed of planes and spheres, and use all CPU cores while doing so.

Building

This is a stack project. Use the provided Makefile or run

stack build

Running

The program comes with it's own scene description language. To render an image, you must first create some scene description files and then run the program with their paths as arguments. There is no documentation on the grammar – see examples for reference.

From the top level directory, you can execute the program like this:

stack exec -- Raytracer <scene file path>

For development purposes, the included Makefile defines some rules that build and run the project. Some of these rules require other programs to be in your PATH:

• make scenes – renders all examples in the scenes folder
• make bench – renders a scene and uses the time utility to show how much CPU is used (requires zsh)
• make threadscope – renders a scene and show how well the rendering process was parallelized (requires threadscope)
• make memory – renders a scene and shows the program's memory usage as a function of time (requires hp2pretty)
• make profiteur – renders a scene and shows profiling information^* in a nice webpage format (requires profiteur)
• make docs – builds the Haddock documentation
• make clean - clears the workspace of junk

^* – this rule uses the open command native to macOS. If you are using some other OS, you will need to open the generated .prof.html file manually.

Caveats

This project deliberately does not utilize the GPU for rendering. That's why, for performeance reasons, point light sources in this program are indeed points, that is, they have no surface area. To create realistic shading effects, the Phong reflection model is used wherever the ray intersects with a surface.

Documentation

Haddock documentation can be generated by running make docs in the main directory.