Crate crystal_ball

Crystal Ball is a path tracing library written in Rust.

It uses rayon for parallelization and can save the rendered image in various formats thanks to the image crate.

Note that Crystal Ball is a hobby project and will most likely see a lot of API changes in future versions.

Features

• Multithreaded CPU rendering
• Save rendered images in various formats
• Environment textures
• General purpose PBR material
• Shapes: spheres and triangle meshes
• Easily create your own textures, materials, and shapes
• Load glTF files
• Depth of field
• Bounding Volume Hierarchies
• Optional denoising using Open Image Denoise

Usage

Basic Example

A basic example rendering two spheres.

use std::default::Default;
use std::sync::Arc;

use crystal_ball::prelude::*;

fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    let objects = vec![
        Object::new(
            Arc::new(Sphere::new()),
            Arc::new(PbrMaterial {
                base_color: Color::new(1.0, 0.45, 0.31),
                ..Default::default()
            }),
        ),
        Object::new(
            Arc::new(
                Sphere::new()
                    .translate(Vec3::new(0.0, -101.0, 0.0))
                    .scale_xyz(Vec3::splat(100.0)),
            ),
            Arc::new(PbrMaterial::default()),
        ),
    ];

    let scene = Scene {
        objects,
        camera: Camera::default().translate(Vec3::new(0.0, 0.0, 5.0)),
        ..Default::default()
    };

    let engine = RenderEngine::default();
    let image = engine.render(&scene);

    image.write("basic.png")?;

    Ok(())
}

Take a look at the examples to see how to use Crystal Ball’s different features.

Coordinate System

Crystal Ball uses a right-handed coordinate system where

• +X points right
• +Y points up
• +Z points to the screen

Feature Flags

Optional Features

Name	description
oidn	Image denoising using Open Image Denoise

Modules

color

Data types and functions related to colors and images.

materials

Data types and functions related to materials.

math

Data types and functions related to math with focus on vectors.

prelude

Commonly used structs and traits for easy access.

rendering

Data types and functions related to rendering.

shapes

Geometric shapes that can be placed into the scene.

util

Utility data types and functions used throughout Crystal Ball.

Derive Macros

Transformable

Easily implement Transformable.