Rusty Ray Tracer

rtrtr - Rusty Ray Tracer

Cameron Christensen - Fall 2021

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I started this both to brush up on ray tracing and to learn Rust.

For the former I've been (for the first time) following Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend. I took his class awhile back* and fell in love with ray tracing, and took Cem Yuksel's class at the University of Utah a bit later**, and now here I am, finally pursuing my dreams, but with a bit of professional experience under my belt to share. *1999, **2013

For the latter, I was inspired to try by Will Usher's admiration for the language, and it's been delightful. I've started with the The Rust Programming Language book, skipping around a bit since they teach Traits a little late, and at some point my code had grown large enough to need modularizing.

I go back and forth between learning new aspects of the language and re-awakening to the art of image synthesis. I try to follow Peter's (and many other authors') advice to just sit down and work, but sometimes solving problems and having inspiration come on those bike rides, walks, and... well, I guess that's it--between coding and sleep. It's overwhelming to realize how much there is to learn, but comforting to know I'll never have to stop. Well, I guess at some point, but... well, maybe I'll get a sticker or something that says Ray trace till I die!

One of the other things I'm starting to learn on the side is Vulkan, and there's a Rust library for this. It's somewhere near the top of my list to try it out.

Please keep in mind this is my very first Rust app. The todo list is long and fraught with peril (I just wanted to say that). My creative spirit and professional organization hopefully permeate this. One of the ways I've enjoyed going back through the code is commit by commit--someone could probably make a Processing sketch for this--and I have a journal directory for every phase of the project. Sometimes I cleanup, other times I add something. I've so far intentionally avoided looking at other RTiOW ray tracers built with Rust, since I want to [re-]learn and trying is one of the best ways to do so, but pretty soon I'll take a peek to see the way others implement things.

Thanks!

*I didn't realize when I came up with it that my ray tracer name might be familiar to some of us sparker fans already, but if you think about it, rtrt is probably pretty rusty by now as well, so...