In ray marching, every object is defined by a so called signed distance funtion, SDF for short. A SDF gives the distance between a point in space and a surface, with negative values meaning the point is inside the object.
To trace a ray in a certain direction, we can take the minimum of all SDFs in the scene and move by that amount in that direction. We can now repeat this process until the smallest distance is zero (or very close to it).
Like all ray tracing algorithms, ray marching allows for very realistic lighting simulations.

Features

The engine is currently a WIP and new features are added with almost every commit.
Current features include:

Nothing yet :(

Language

Raychel is written in standard C++20 using as little hacks as possible. The design style is rather functional than object oriented, although OO patterns are used.

Building

Compiler Support

Raychel is primarily developed on a GNU/Linux system, so changes that break Windows compatibility may not be fixed immediately. The following compilers work for sure:

Clang 13
GCC 11

Dependencies / Library credit

No dependency management is currently implemented, so you have to install the following libraries manually:

RaychelLogger
RaychelCore
RaychelMath
GSL
Catch2 only needed when building unit tests

How to build

After cloning the repository with

git clone https://github.com/Weckyy702/Raychel

create the build directory using

mkdir build; cd build

and run cmake:

cmake <your options> ..

Lastly, build the library itself with

make

I found a bug!!

Nicely done! Please report it in the issues tab or open a pull request with your fix.

Languages

C++ 95.8%

CMake 2.4%

C 1%

Python 0.6%

Dockerfile 0.2%