Add tinyraytracer notebook

[anutosh491]

Description

As the smallpt notebook was removed, I'm taking this chance to add a better example imo here.

1. We dropped the SDL support along with smallpt which is great as SDL wasn't contributing much and we also reduce the size of xcpp.data so yeah faster loading. This doesn't mean we can't have the smallpt example in the notebook. Recreating it should be trivial.
2. But smallpt takes about 7 hours to generate a crystal clear image, and we were running it for about 2 mins to have a very poor image.
3. I've replaced it with an equally popular choice for ray tracing taught as a part of a university course (https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraytracer/wiki). Much better image in just 15 seconds and plain C++

Type of change

Please tick all options which are relevant.

• Bug fix
• New feature
• Added/removed dependencies
• Required documentation updates

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 81.94%. Comparing base (6cad0a4) to head (556c776).

Additional details and impacted files

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  Coverage   81.94%   81.94%           
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  Files          21       21           
  Lines         853      853           
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  Misses        154      154           

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[mcbarton]

My comments on this PR are

1. The notebook needs adding to the deployment and documentation

2. If you look at the faq for license the ray tracer example has here https://www.wtfpl.net/faq/ , you'll see it says 'The WTFPL lets you relicense the work under any other license.' . To me this says we can have the code in the repo under the bsd 3 of the rest of repo, so may not need to licence file added. This is not legal advice though. Just thought I'd bring it up so others can discuss.

[anutosh491]

Ahh perfect, if I can get rid of this weird license that would be awesome. I'll just get rid of it if that's how it's supposed to work

[anutosh491]

This is ready from my end if someone can help me with the merge !

[mcbarton]

@anutosh491 2 quick questions before I approve.

1. The title of the notebook is 'Tiny Ray Tracer in xeus-cpp-lite'. Does this example not work for the native kernel? Nothing in the notebook stood out to be as to why it would only work for the Emscripten kernel.

2. Little bit of nit pick but do we need

The tutorial builds a ray tracer step-by-step, starting from basic vector math and gradually introducing spheres, materials, shadows, reflections, refractions, and finally global illumination.

The implementation in this notebook corresponds to Step 9 of the tutorial series, and can be extended further as an assignment toward Step 10, producing a more advanced final render.

in the notebook. It feels sufficient that we already pointed the user towards the tutorial series with a link.

[anutosh491]

The title of the notebook is 'Tiny Ray Tracer in xeus-cpp-lite'. Does this example not work for the native kernel? Nothing in the notebook stood out to be as to why it would only work for the Emscripten kernel.

Ahh yess it should just work right ? Haven't given it a shot !

Little bit of nit pick but do we need

Well this covers step 9 -> I plan to advertise our notebook to the professor behind this once this goes in and have it hosted on his repo -> it has 5k+ stars and good traffic so I'm guessing more students will try it out and report back -> as soon as someone cracks step 10 which is a much better notebook -> we update to step 10 !

[anutosh491]

Ahh yess it should just work right ? Haven't given it a shot !

Works perfectly as we want it to

I'll just edit the xeus-cpp-lite to xeus-cpp in the heading !

[anutosh491]

I'll just edit the xeus-cpp-lite to xeus-cpp in the heading !

Done.

[mcbarton]

Just approved but I think it should be 'Tiny Ray Tracer using xeus-cpp' and not 'Tiny Ray Tracer in xeus-cpp'. Feel free to merge though if your ok with what it is.

[anutosh491]

Just approved but I think it should be 'Tiny Ray Tracer using xeus-cpp' and not 'Tiny Ray Tracer in xeus-cpp'. Feel free to merge though if your ok with what it is.

We had "smallpt in xeus-cpp" if you remember, so probably I just used that :~)