Ray Tracing in One Weekend - Go Implementation

This is a complete Go implementation of Peter Shirley's famous "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" tutorial. It implements a fully functional path tracer from scratch with no external graphics libraries.

Features

• Custom Vec3 math library
• Rays, Spheres, and Hittables
• Materials:
  • Lambertian (diffuse)
  • Metal (reflective)
  • Dielectric (glass/refractive)
• Positionable camera with Defocus Blur (Depth of Field)
• Antialiasing (multisampling)
• Multi-core parallel rendering: Automatically uses all CPU cores for significantly faster renders.
• Direct-to-file PPM output (bypasses Windows terminal encoding bugs).
• Uses Go 1.22+ math/rand/v2 for guaranteed non-deterministic random scenes.

Building and Running

Ensure you have Go installed.

1. Build the executable:

   go build -o rt.exe .

2. Run the renderer. By default, it outputs a quick preview (400x225, 50 samples per pixel) to output.ppm:

   ./rt.exe

3. Or specify a custom output filename:

   ./rt.exe my_render.ppm

To render the high-quality final cover image (1200x675, 500 samples per pixel), edit main.go and update ImageWidth to 1200 and SamplesPerPixel to 500, then recompile and run.

Viewing PPM files

The output is a standard .ppm (Portable Pixmap) file. You can view this using tools like IrfanView, GIMP, or drag and drop it into an online PPM viewer like ppmviewer.com.