A ray tracer project implemented in Rust. It is inspired by The Ray Tracer Challenge by Jamis Buck. The book provides pseudocode and test cases; the implementation is left to the reader.
- Overview
- What is Ray Tracing?
- Features
- How to run this project
- Screenshots
- Roadmap
- Learning Notes
- Resources
- Author
This project serves two purposes:
- Showcase: to demonstrate my progress in building a ray tracer step by step.
- Learning Log: to capture insights about Rust, graphics programming, and math along the way.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates how light interacts with objects and materials to produce highly realistic images.
It’s powerful for accuracy but computationally expensive.
- Chapter 01: ???
cargo run --release- Basic ray–sphere renderer
- Shadows & multiple light sources
- Reflections & refractions
- Additional primitives: planes, cubes, cylinders, cones etc
- Patterned materials (stripes, gradients, checkers, perturbed textures)
- Complex scenes with multiple objects and light sources
- Performance optimizations (bounding volume hierarchy, parallelism, SIMD?)
- Full test coverage with language-agnostic examples from the book
- Comprehensive Rust documentation (
cargo docwith examples) - Project restructuring to target WebAssembly
- Build a web app frontend to generate 3D images interactively
- Publish online demo with examples and benchmarks
Things I’ve learned while working on this project:
- Rust’s ownership model pushed me toward cleaner data flow between rays, geometry, and scenes.
- Writing matrix math from scratch clarified transformations and coordinate systems.
- Debugging intersections required intermediate visualizations (like surface normals).
- Translating pseudocode into idiomatic Rust often meant rethinking data structures.
- The Ray Tracer Challenge — Jamis Buck
- Ray Tracing on Wikipedia
- Rust Book
- Cargo Documentation
- Cucumber Rust Repo
- Cucumber Rust Docs
- GitHub — princemuel
- Twitter — @iamprincemuel