rangho / powershell-raytracing

Raytracing in one weekend, in PowerShell.

Raytracing in One Weekend, PowerShell edition

This project is part of Project Lemonade.

Simple path tracer written in PowerShell, based on Raytracing in One Weekend online book.

Currently, this repository can generate the following image:

This image was created using the follwing command every commit made to the main branch:

Import-Module .\Sources\PSRaytracing.psm1
Invoke-Raytracing `
  -ImageWidth 640 `
  -ImageHeight 360 `
  -OutputFile "output.png"

Why PowerShell of all things

Read this explanation from Project Lemonade website.

How to run

First, clone and enter this repository.

git clone https://github.com/RangHo/powershell-raytracing
cd powershell-raytracing

Enter PowerShell, and import the PSRaytracing module available in Sources/ directory.

Import-Module .\Sources\PSRaytracing.psm1

This module provides Invoke-Raytracing cmdlet that renders a scene. Provide -ImageWidth and -ImageHeight to set the output image's width and height.

Invoke-Raytracing -ImageWidth 160 -ImageHeight 90

Since all vector arithmetic is implemented in PowerShell, the rendering process is extremely slow. Currently there is no plan to accelerate individual calculations via .NET Numerics library. Speed is not part of the goal of this project, but it may be implemented in the future, after the base implementation is complete.

powershell-raytracing's Issues

`System.Drawing` assembly is not supported on non-Windows platforms

Starting from .NET 6, System.Drawing assembly that this script depends on no longer supports platforms other than Windows. In .NET 7, the compile-time switch that allows System.Drawing.Common package to be used is removed. See this link for more info.

Since this raytracer depends on System.Drawing for PNG output, we need to address this issue. There are two possibilities:

1. Introduce third-party image processing libraries, such as SkiaSharp;
2. Revert back to PPM output just like the OG Raytracing Book does.