miniRT

A ray tracer built from scratch in C: scene parsing, camera projection, ray/primitive intersection, Phong lighting, shadows, textures and bump mapping — rendered live in a window with MiniLibX.

42 School project — final grade 125 / 100.

Features

Rendering

• Ray/primitive intersection: sphere, plane, cylinder, cone
• Camera with configurable position, orientation and field of view
• Ambient + diffuse (Lambertian) lighting, Phong specular highlights
• Hard shadows, multiple point lights, colored lights

Materials

• Solid colors or XPM textures, with analytic UV mapping per primitive (spherical, cylindrical, planar)
• Checkerboard pattern on any primitive
• Bump mapping from XPM heightmaps, using a per-hit TBN (Tangent/Bitangent/Normal) frame

Live interaction

• Move/rotate the camera, or pick an object with a click and move/rotate it instead
• Mouse wheel to move along the vertical axis, scroll-independent of camera orientation
• Zoom via field of view, adjustable on the fly
• Toggle individual pipeline stages at runtime (color, lights, shadows, specular, bump)

Parsing

• Custom .rt scene file format: camera, ambient light, point lights, primitives, optional textures/bump maps/checkerboard
• Strict, uniform field validation shared across all object types

Build

make          # build miniRT
make bonus    # build miniRT_bonus
make clean    # remove object files
make fclean   # remove object files and binaries
make re       # rebuild from scratch

The binary links against MiniLibX (X11) and statically builds an in-house libft.

Usage

./miniRT scenes/<filename>.rt

A  0.2  255,255,255
C  0,0,-5  0,0,1  70
L  -2,5,-3  0.8  255,255,255
sp  0,0,0  2  255,0,0
pl  0,-2,0  0,1,0  100,200,100
cy  1,0,3  0,1,0  1  3  0,0,255

Input	Action
ESC / red cross	Close the window
Arrow keys	Move the camera (or the selected object)
WASDQE	Rotate the camera (or the selected object)
Mouse wheel	Move up / down
+ / -	Change the camera's field of view
Left click	Select the object under the cursor
Right click	Deselect
Numpad 1-8	Toggle a rendering stage (color, lights, shadows, specular, bump...)
Numpad 9 / 0	Enable / disable all rendering stages

Project structure

The codebase is organized by feature: every module keeps its .c files and its own header side by side, and shares the scene's data model through a single header.

srcs/
├── app/            window & event loop, input handling, camera control, HUD
├── math/           vector math (dot, cross, normalize, reflect...)
├── parse/          .rt scene file tokenizing & parsing
├── raytrace/       ray/primitive intersection and normals (sphere, plane, cylinder, cone)
├── render/         lighting, shadows, bump mapping, per-pixel color
├── scene_object.h  shared scene/object data model
├── common.h        shared base types (vectors, image buffer)
└── main.c
libft/              in-house standard library replacement
minilibx-linux/     window & graphics backend (X11)

Dependency tracking is handled with -MMD -MP, so only the object files that actually depend on a changed header are rebuilt. The whole codebase is 42 Norm compliant.

Authors

• davsam97
• wiwu