Something you might not know about me is that I’m an avid home cook. As such, I like to experiment in the kitchen, improvise new recipes, and modify existing ones. I also track my calorie and macronutrient intake. I have software tools for this, but I don’t like them and eventually I got fed up and decided to write my own. I also thought it would be interesting to try working with the garage door up and writing more publicly about what I’m working on, so this is part one of an ongoing s...| bheisler.github.io
Well, it’s that time again. This is the start of a second series of articles on raytracing in Rust following on from my previous series. This time, I’ll be doing all of the rendering on a GPU using Accel - see my previous post on Accel. I thought this would be a good project for learning about GPU programming, see. Second, this time I want to write a path tracer, rather than a raytracer.| bheisler.github.io
NOTE: Much of what I discuss below is no longer accurate. For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a follow-up to my series on Writing a Raytracer in Rust. This time around, I’ll be talking about writing a GPU-accelerated Path Tracer. As always, I’m writing it in Rust - including the GPU kernel code. Compiling Rust for GPUs at this point is difficult and error-prone, so I thought it would be good to start with some documentation on that aspect of the problem before diving into pat...| bheisler.github.io
Hello! This is a detailed example of exposing Rust code to other languages (in this case, Python). Most articles I’ve seen that cover this topic uses really trivial example functions, skipping over a lot of the complexity. Even the better ones out there typically don’t have a pre-existing, reasonably complex program to work with. I’m going to start with trivial functions and build my way up to being able to define a scene for my raytracer in Python using a series of calls to Rust, then ...| bheisler.github.io
Hello again, and welcome to the final part of my series on writing a raytracer in Rust (Part 1, Part 2). Previously we implemented a basic raytracer which could handle diffuse shading of planes and spheres with multiple objects and multiple lights. This time, we’ll add texturing, reflection and transparent objects. First, I’ve refactored the common parts of Sphere and Plane out to a separate structure. Since this post is all about handling more complex surface properties, we’ll need a s...| bheisler.github.io
Welcome to Part 2 of my series on writing a raytracer in Rust. If you haven’t already, you may wish to read Part 1. Previously, we implemented a basic raytracer which can render only a single sphere with no lighting. This time, we’ll add multiple objects, planes, and basic lighting. Multiple Objects It’s pretty easy to change our scene definition to contain a Vec of spheres instead of just a single one.| bheisler.github.io