Ray Marcher

Implementation of a fast ray marcher based on sphere tracing.

This project was part of the ETH Course - Advanced Systems Lab. In a team of 4 members, we had to optimize a specific algorithm following some guidelines learned in class.

Here is the final report.

Multiple Optimizations

On the branches of this repository you find all the optimization steps we performed to reach a high performant vectorized implementation of a raymarcher. The branches are labeled as master_optX where X goes from 1 to 5 (5 being the most performant of all).

How to compile and run

Dependencies

No dependencies are required to run our raymarcher. Everything is self-contained.

Compile

First compile the project by running these commands from the root directory:

cd build
make

A file called raymarcher will be created.

Run

In the build folder run ./raymarcher. After the execution the output will be placed into the output directory.

Compile and Run

If you want to simply compile and run all the predefined scenes, then run the following:

On UNIX:

team049$ cd build
team049/build$ bash run_raymarcher.sh 

Scenes

A Scene is composed of geometric shapes that are each defined by a signed distance function. The combination of all these shapes creates a signed distance space. Our raymarcher algorithm is then applied on this space.

The creation of a scene is defined via a JSON file that gets parsed via a custom JSON parser. With this pipeline we built you can create and customize any scene you want.

The currently available scenes are in the team049/scenes/ folder.

Authors

Nihat Isik - (github: devnio)

Qais El Okaili - (github: Xemno)

Alexandre Cavaleri - (github: cavEpfl)

David Graf - (github: fxd24)