I wanted to write a ray tracer, and Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend seemed like a good place to start! Nearly all of the C++ was written by him, though I've gone through and added a couple of things that helped me both in understanding the content and building the files.
One of the earliest things I wrote for this project was the Makefile- some instructions for it:
After navigating to the Ray-Tracing directory, you can run three commands.
make will compile the program
make test will compile and run the program
make clean will delete the last compiled version of the program, the .ppm file, and the .txt file.
For people who are unfamiliar with .ppm's- that's the image file! Your computer should be able to open them directly. If not, there are a few online .ppm viewers, and I've also included the .txt file in there too.
Another thing I have changed is that in Peter's original code, the same image would be generated each time. I seed the random number generator because I thought it would be fun to have a new picture on each run. Feel free to remove the srand( time(NULL) ) ; line in generateppm.cpp. This can be helpful for troubleshooting or the like.
I've also added MUCH more in-line commenting that Peter