rayforge

A multithreaded, zero-dependency ray tracer written in pure Rust.

Inspired by Ray Tracing in One Weekend. Currently renders spheres with anti-aliasing, multi-threading, and a simple config file. Outputs PPM.

Features

• Zero external dependencies — only the standard library + workspace crates
• Multithreaded rendering with dynamic work stealing (row chunks)
• Configurable via config.env (resolution, samples, threads, FOV, …)
• Anti-aliasing via multi-sample jittered sampling
• Builder pattern for the camera (CameraBuilder)

Strict Clippy lints (pedantic + nursery + no unwrap/panic/indexing)

Project Layout

.
├── Cargo.toml                 # workspace root
├── config.env                 # render settings
├── crates/
│   ├── rayforge/              # binary crate
│   ├── rayforge_core/         # core library (math, shapes, camera, …)
│   └── rander/                # tiny RNG
├── README.md
└── ROADMAP.md

Quick Start

clone & build

cargo build --release

render with defaults from config.env

cargo run --release -p rayforge

output lands in render.ppm (or whatever you set in config.env)

View the result with any image viewer that supports PPM, or convert it:

Configuration (config.env)

output_name=render.ppm
image_width_pixels=1920
image_height_pixels=1080
viewport_height=2.0
focal_length=1.0
samples_per_pixel=100
vfov=90.0
max_depth=50
// num_threads=8
// optional — defaults to available parallelism

Missing keys fall back to sensible defaults. The whole file can be absent and the renderer still runs.

Current Scene

A small sphere floating above a giant ground sphere (classic “two spheres” test). Easy to extend. just push more Shapes::Sphere into the HittableList in main.rs.