Iridium is a simple, lightweight, and portable ray-tracer written in C++.

• Support for various primitives
  • Spheres
  • Triangles
  • Planes (parallelograms)
• Complex objects from .off files
• Support for custom materials
• Acceleration structures (bounding volume hierarchy)
• Point lights with various colours and intensities
• Support for various camera types
  • Perspective
  • Orthographic
• Arbitrary camera transformations
• Support for multiple image formats
  • PNG
  • PPM (no compression, but handles extremely large renders better)
• Support for various rendering techniques
  • Blinn-Phong shading
  • Shadows
  • Reflections
  • Depth of field
• Scene mechanism to configure object positions, materials, and lights
• Multithreaded rendering

Create build directory

mkdir build
cd build

On Linux, you will need a C++ compiler, CMake, and Make. For Debian-based distributions, you can install them with:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake

Generate CMake files

# For debug builds, use:
cmake ..

# For release builds, use:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

Build the project

# Replace 32 with the number of threads you want to use to compile the project
make -j 32

On Windows, you will need Visual Studio with the "Desktop development with C++" workload, as well as CMake. You can find the latest version of CMake here. You can find the latest version of Visual Studio here.

With Ninja, you will need to ensure that Ninja is in your PATH and that it is the default toolchain.

Generate CMake files

# For debug builds, use:
cmake -GNinja ..

# For release builds, use:
cmake -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

If the detected toolchain is GNU (perhaps from having MinGW installed), you can force Ninja to use the MSVC toolchain by running the vcvarsall.bat script from the Visual Studio installation directory before running CMake. For Visual Studio Enterprise 2022, this file is located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat.

Build the project.

# Replace 32 with the number of threads you want to use to compile the project
cmake --build . -j 32

With Visual Studio, the build configuration is specified during the build phase. To generate the solution files, run:

cmake ..

Build the project

# For debug builds, use:
cmake --build . --config Debug

# For release builds, use:
cmake --build . --config Release

Iridium is a command-line program. The parameters can be configured using a YAML-based scene file. By default, Iridium will look for data/scene.yaml. To override this, simply pass the path to the scene file as the first argument.

# If on Windows, don't forget to append .exe!
Iridium

Iridium data/scene.yml

The default scene that is generated when run without any parameters. This corresponds to data/scene.yml.