Raytracer

A 3D renderer written in C++23 that simulates light propagation using raytracing — rays bounce between surfaces to generate reflections, refractions, shadows and materials. Scenes are described in plain configuration files and rendered to PPM images, with multithreaded rendering via OpenMP.

Features

• OOP architecture — primitives, lights and materials behind clean interfaces (IPrimitive, ILight, IMaterial), instantiated through factories
• Plugin system — components are loaded dynamically as shared libraries (DLLoader / PluginFactory), so the renderer can be extended without recompiling the core (see scenes/Plugins_Docu.md)
• Primitives — spheres, planes, boxes, cones, cylinders, tori, triangles, and .obj mesh loading
• 3D fractals — Mandelbulb, Menger sponge, Sierpinski, Möbius strip, tangle cube
• Materials — Lambertian, Phong, reflective, refractive, and textures
• Lights — point, directional and ambient lighting
• Scene description — human-readable .cfg files parsed with libconfig++; change a scene without recompiling
• Multithreading — parallel rendering with OpenMP when available
• Sample scenes — point-light, primitive and fractal demos in scenes/

Build

Requires CMake, a C++23 compiler, and libconfig++ (fetched automatically if missing). OpenMP is used when available.

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Usage

./raytracer <scene.cfg>

The render is written to output.ppm. Example:

./raytracer scenes/scene_pointlight.cfg

A scene file describes the renderer settings, camera, materials, lights and primitives. See scenes/ for ready-to-use examples and scenes/Plugins_Docu.md for the scene/plugin format.

Credits

Team project realized as part of the Epitech curriculum — OOP module.

• Nielsen Combe-Bracciale
• Mathys Aberkane
• Sefkan Aydogdu
• Julie Vincent