acolley / scatter Goto Github PK

Create an asset store/cache for loading generic assets (e.g. images, meshes) and keeping a single copy in memory.

This will have to support storing the assets under an Arc as they will be accessed concurrently.

Add support for Area Lights, which should be represented by a mesh and emit light from its surface. Might be worth extending the Light trait to support the sample_f function from pbrt in order to sample a direction from the light.

Implement the necessary traits to automatically Serialize and Deserialize a Scene using serde. This also allows us to use all of the serde backends as serialization targets in the future.

Add support for Lua scripting for defining the Scene and the options of the ray tracer using https://crates.io/crates/hlua.

This will involve exposing various structures and associated methods for use across the Lua->Rust interface.

Features required:

• Allow Scene to be constructed and populated with SceneNodes.
• Allow Renderer to be constructed and be customised.
• Allow creation of arbitrary SceneNodes and their properties
  • Primitive type (Sphere, Box, Triangle Mesh etc.)
  • Material
  • Transform (Position and Rotation in world space)
• Run the ray tracer with given Renderer and Scene
• Output result of tracing to various formats (image or otherwise)

https://crates.io/crates/palette

Add support for triangle meshes in the scene description file.

Implement better sampling methods that can be used to sample the camera rays and sampling for light transport algorithms.

Implement transmittance which is a model of how much light along the length of a ray is scattered/absorbed by the medium in which it's travelling.

This can be very simple with a constant absorption defined for the world, or complex with geometric volumes defined for simulating smoke/fog etc.

Add support for triangle meshes to be intersected against, normal calculations and support uv mapping for texturing.

This could be a progress bar made using ncurses in the terminal.

Later it could be a visualisation of the image as it is being rendered.

Add support for a simple BTDF.

Parallelise the rendering process. Look into use mpsc (Multi-producer Single-consumer) channels from the Rust standard library.

This blog has more information on implementing something similar in Rust http://www.willusher.io/2015/05/15/porting-a-ray-tracer-to-rust-part-3/.

This is important as it will enable quicker feedback when testing new features.

Support loading .obj files as triangle meshes.

Have a look at https://crates.io/crates/nom for parsing arbitrary file formats. Nice walkthrough example of parsing a datetime https://fnordig.de/2015/07/16/omnomnom-parsing-iso8601-dates-using-nom/.

Alternatively just add https://crates.io/crates/tobj.

This issue is dependent on #3.

Implement a simple path tracing integrator.

Add a Material struct that allows interesting surface shaders to be described using a simple interface.

To avoid having to re-compile the project each time the scene is changed implement a simple Scene file format. This could also define the options for the ray tracer (trace depth, number of samples etc.).

Look at using either TOML (https://crates.io/crates/toml) or RON (https://github.com/kvark/ron) for the file format.

This could eventually become obsolete in light of #1 but this will be vastly simpler to implement.

Support LOD reduction for longer viewing distances where high polygon counts are wasted.

This can either be done procedurally or with a number of lower detail meshes for high polygon meshes.