Convector

Interactive CPU path tracer.

On the left: interactive mode, running at about 10 fps on my machine. On the right: accumulative mode, after rendering for a few minutes.

Requirements

Hardware: a CPU that supports the AVX instructions is required. In practice this means Sandy Bridge or later. FMA instructions can be taken advantage of too, those are Haswell or later.

Software: a recent nightly version of the Rust programming language is required. Version 1.10 is recommended. On Windows you need the version with the MSVC ABI.

Compiling and Running

• cargo run --release to build and run the release executable.
• cargo build --release to build in release mode without running.
• cargo bench to build and run all benchmarks in release mode.
• cargo test to build and run all tests in debug mode.

If you do not want to use the FMA instructions, remove the +fma from the codegen options in .cargo/config.

Controls

• Press b to toggle blending recent frames.
• Press d to toggle debug view. The green channel shows the number of primary AABB intersections, the blue channel shows the number of primary triangle intersections.
• Press m to toggle the median filter for noise reduction.
• Press q to quit the application.
• Press r to switch between realtime and accumulative rendering.
• Press s to print statistics to the console.
• Press t to write a trace to trace.json. It can be opened with Chrome by going to chrome://tracing.

About the code

Many structs represent eight instances at once for SIMD. In that case the name has been prefixed with M (for “multi”). The single-instance struct types have the prefix S instead (for “single”).

The most interesting stuff is in src/triangle.rs, src/material.rs, and src/renderer.rs, and src/bvh.rs. Shaders are in src/gpu.

License

Convector is free software. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.