RT

A minimal ray tracer implementing 3D rendering, lighting, and camera simulation.

📖 Description

RT is a CPU ray tracer written in C for the 42 RT project. It parses .rtscene files and renders spheres, planes, cylinders, and cones with lighting, shadows, reflections, and procedural checker textures. MiniLibX is used for display on Linux and macOS.

Here are examples of what our RT can do:

🛠️ Features

• Shapes: sphere, plane, cylinder, cone.
• Materials: diffuse color, specular highlights, reflections, checker pattern.
• Lighting: ambient light + multiple colored point lights.
• Hard shadows and recursive reflections (configurable depth).
• 2x2 antialiasing (4 samples per pixel).
• Fast preview mode for interactive camera movement.
• Multithreaded rendering (see NUM_THREADS in include/mrt.h).
• Finite cylinders and cones with end caps.
• Progressive refresh while rendering.
• Render time logging per frame.
• Tunable parameters (resolution, threads, AA samples, reflection depth, pixel step).
• Shadow bias to reduce self-shadowing artifacts.

Build

make

Common targets:

make clean
make fclean
make re

Run

./rt scenes/spaceship.rt

More scenes are available in scenes/.

Controls

• Esc: quit.
• F: toggle fast mode (lower quality, faster renders, enables movement).
• W/A/S/D: move camera (fast mode only).
• Space/Ctrl: move up/down (fast mode only).
• Arrow keys: adjust look direction (fast mode only).
• Q/E: adjust look direction on Y axis (fast mode only).

Fast mode disables antialiasing and specular highlights, reduces reflection depth, and increases pixel step size for speed.

Scene format

Each scene must have exactly one ambient light (A) and one camera (C), at least one light (L), and at least one object. Lines starting with # are comments. The file must end with .rt.

# Ambient: A ratio(0..1) R,G,B(0..255)
A 0.2 255,255,255

# Camera: C pos(x,y,z) look(x,y,z) fov(0..180)
C 0,-5,0 0,0,0 70

# Light: L pos(x,y,z) ratio(0..1) R,G,B(0..255)
L 0,-10,5 1.0 255,255,255

# Sphere: sp pos diameter R,G,B shininess(0..256) reflection(0..1) checker(0|1)
sp -3,0,0 1 255,64,128 32 0.3 0

# Plane: pl pos orient(x,y,z) R,G,B shininess reflection checker
pl 0,0,-2 0,0,0 255,255,255 0 0 1

# Cylinder: cy pos orient(x,y,z) diameter height R,G,B shininess reflection checker
cy 0,0,0 0,0,0 1 1 128,255,64 64 0.2 0

# Cone: co pos orient(x,y,z) diameter height R,G,B shininess reflection checker
co 3,0,0 0.3,0,0 1 1 64,128,255 32 0.2 0

Notes:

• look and orient components must be in the range -1.0 to 1.0.
• Colors are integers in 0..255.
• checker toggles a procedural checker texture.

👤 Authors

• hanmpark
• YounesBouhlel
• Shazway
• evnsh