Ray Tracing in One Weekend

This is a simple Rust implementation of Peter Shirley's “Ray Tracing in One Weekend.”

Compared to the original C++ version this version

• Has a slightly nicer scene (fewer intersections/collisions and no floating spheres)
• Doesn't contain oodles of memory leaks 😉 (Rust memory safety FTW)
• Writes a binary BMP instead of an ASCII PPM, because text formats are never the right choice IMNSHO
• Has some simple parallelization using rayon via ndarray
• Uses external crates such as nalgebra for Vec3 and has fewer roll-your-own data structures in general

Compared to other Rust versions [1, 2] I chose to stick closer to the C++ original in that the code uses trait objects for runtime polymorphism instead of enums, i.e., my list of hittables is a

Vec<Box<dyn Hittable + Sync>>

instead of a

Vec<Sphere>

and the material reference in the Sphere object is an

Arc<dyn Material + Send + Sync>

instead of something like

pub enum Material {
	Lambertian(Lambertian),
	Metal(Metal),
	Dielectric(Dielectric),
}

where the Send and Sync constraints are for parallelization. The choice to use trait objects was mainly because this was an exercise in using Rust's trait objects for me 😄.

There is currently one line of unsafe code in here, probably because I used rayon/ndarray incorrectly. Suggestions are welcome.

Open Image Denoise

When the use_oidn feature is enabled, raytracing-weekend-rs uses Intel®'s Open Image Denoise library via Will Usher's oidn-rs bindings to reduce the amount of noise.

When enabled, the OIDN_DIR environment variable must be set to the root of the Open Image Denoise installation for building and Path/LD_LIBRARY_PATH must be set so that the corresponding DLLs/SOs are found at runtime.