Show HN: Godray – a simple ray tracer

[ppymou]

Wrote this with friend as a learning project for golang. Any golang tips would be much appreciated.

[856dfiuk]

What would you recommend for writing a simple ray tracer? Any books or websites?

[ppymou]

For me, going through wikipedia article on phong and working out the math with my friends (instead of just blindly translating the equations to code) really helped me understand the basics.

In order to learn more (I admittedly know very little about anything other than the phong model - the other friend is much more knowledgable), I presume either a textbook or a course notes like this https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs488/notes.pdf will probably help.

[pavlov]

Physically Based Rendering is a great, practical book on writing raytracers:

http://www.pbrt.org

[drewmate]

Are there any dependencies to run it on Windows? I do 'go run src/main.go' on Windows, and nothing happens and there are no errors reported.

[jackhxs]

Hi, I worked on this project as well. I tried it on Windows, it ran without issues. If you run 'go run src/main.go', it should create output.png in the current directory. Then you should be able to run 'explorer output.png' to view the image.

[ppymou]

The code should have no dependency other the standard go library.

You should see an output.png if it run successfully in the same folder.

Sorry, no easy access to a windows right now, but I will try it out on when I get a chance.

[_ph_]

What is the license for the code?

[ppymou]

Ah. An oversight on our part, we will make it MIT licensed so feel free to do whatever you want with it.

[jackhxs]

I've added MIT license to the repo.

[mazeway]

How do you find a friend to study and write code with you?