pyRT - The Python Raytracer
Project description
PyRT (pronounced pirate) is a raytracer/image generator for Python 3.5. This project is mainly done with the following in mind:
Ray Tracing in the Jupyter Notebook
Teaching ray tracing
Exploring ray tracing concepts for geo data using Python.
Rendering geo data, including large point clouds.
Implementing new algorithms for rendering large 3D city models.
Creating 3D-Maps from OpenStreetMap data
Server-side rendering / cloud based rendering
…
PyRT is work in progress.
Installation
Installation can be done with pip. Please note that pyrt is still under heavy development and not yet meant for production. (API breaks are frequent!)
pip install pyrt
…or just get the source from github: https://github.com/martinchristen/pyRT or gitlab: https://gitlab.com/martin.christen/pyRT
Dependencies
PyRT doesn’t have any dependencies. Generated images are just RGB or RGBA Arrays. To create jpg or png or other images, many demos use Pillow (PIL). So it is highly recommended to install it.
Getting Started: Try the examples
There are a lot of examples available how to use this module. This is the recommended way to get started with pyRT.
Creating Scenes
PyRT is not a 3D-modelling package. It is all about rendering from code.
In PyRT you create a scene first. Scenes consist of atleast one camera and geometry. Creation of scenes is done in an object oriented way:
from pyrt.math import *
from pyrt.geometry import Triangle, Vertex
from pyrt.material import PhongMaterial
from pyrt.camera import PerspectiveCamera
from pyrt.renderer import SimpleRT
camera = PerspectiveCamera(640,480)
scene = Scene()
scene.add(Triangle(Vertex(position=(0, 0, 0)),
Vertex(position=(0, 5, 0)),
Vertex(position=(1, 5, 0)), material=PhongMaterial()))
scene.setCamera(camera)
engine = SimpleRT()
imgdata = engine.render(scene)
PyRT has an open rendering concept, you can create your own renderer. In the example above “SimpleRT” was used, which is a minimalistic reference implementation.
Python & RayTracing, isn’t that too slow ?
No. Custom renderers can be written in C with Python bindings. This is planned in future, later versions will even support the GPU using OpenCL and/or other libraries, but at the moment the primary focus is to create a “pythonic” ray tracer.
License
PyRT is released under MIT. More information about this license can be found under: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
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