raytraCer VS c-ray

I did a lot of this for my raytracer, c-ray [1]. Originally it was just a self-contained C program, but I got tired of writing buggy and limited asset import/export code, so eventually I put together a minimal public C API [2] that I then wrapped with CPython bindings [3] and some additional python code [4] to expose a more 'pythonic' API. It's all still a WIP, but it has already allowed me to write a Blender plugin [5], so now I can play around with my renderer directly in Blender, and test with more complex scenes others have made.

Fun project, and it's really cool to see my little renderer in the interactive viewport in Blender, but I did learn that I don't particularly enjoy working with non-trivial amounts of Python code.

[1] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray

Sort of hypothetical, of course. I just happen to collect old computer hardware and I like to see how old of a system I can compile one of my C projects for. But I bet it’s a requirement for many large software projects as well.

> which I implemented for RenderMan

Cool, you work at Pixar? I've been working on a small hobby renderer [1] for a few years, and RenderMan has been a big inspiration!

[1] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray

Not sure if my long-time renderer project conforms to the suckless ethos. It’s 5 years old, ~8kloc, written in C99 and tries to go about things the simplest way possible. I do kind of pride myself on how much stuff I manage to remove from it as I slowly build it out to be more versatile.