Welcome to blazert’s documentation!¶
This is the official documentation for blazeRT and will be continuously updated.
General
Reference
blazeRT is a double precision ray tracer for scientific or engineering applications derived from nanoRT using blaze datatypes and written in modern C++17. blazeRTs scene interface is similar to embree and intents to be a minimal effort (nearly plugin-) replacement. blazeRT should work on any system and architecture for which a recent (C++17 compatible) compiler is available.
We aim at providing a simple and unambiguous high-level API for the ray-traversal. We do not aim at providing backwards-compatibility (especially to older C++ standards).
blazeRT makes use of the the blaze linear algebra library for its vector types. Because we rely on a well-tested and well-optimized linear algebra library (instead of using our own vector types), blazeRT can focus on the actual ray tracing algorithms. Furthermore, using types from a linear algebra library is advantageous for the subsequent development of scientific application where the vector types are needed again. blazeRT should work with any library providing these vector types as long as certain criteria are met (a minimal set of operation on these vector types).
blazeRT works with triangular meshes and simple primitives, but it is easy to extend blazeRT to work on polygons or more complex primitives. A template for user-defined geometries can be found here. If you implement new geometries, we are more than happy to receive a pull request from you to include it in blazeRT.
blazeRT is tested using unit tests (whose number will increase as development progresses) as well as by comparison of rendering results to reference images. Currently the unit tests cover roughly 90% of files and 69% of lines, but in the tests we try to catch as many (fringe-) cases as possible. We try to ensure high code quality and a reproducible build experience via continuous integration. During the CI process we build the examples and the tests, which need to run successfully in order for the CI to pass. Currently, blazeRT is CI-tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and macOS with gcc and clang.
The documentation of the entire script can be found here.
(Rendered using the path_tracer example adapted from nanoRT and originally contributed by daseyb)