render_scene: Render Scene

In rayrender: Build and Raytrace 3D Scenes

Render Scene

Description

Takes the scene description and renders an image, either to the device or to a filename. The user can also interactively fly around the 3D scene if they have X11 support on their system or are on Windows.

Usage

render_scene(
  scene,
  width = 400,
  height = 400,
  fov = 20,
  samples = 100,
  camera_description_file = NA,
  preview = interactive(),
  interactive = TRUE,
  deferred_render = FALSE,
  denoise = TRUE,
  camera_scale = 1,
  iso = 100,
  auto_exposure = FALSE,
  film_size = 22,
  min_variance = 0,
  min_adaptive_size = 8,
  sample_method = "sobol_blue",
  max_depth = NA,
  roulette_active_depth = 100,
  ambient_light = NULL,
  lookfrom = c(0, 1, -10),
  lookat = c(0, 0, 0),
  camera_up = c(0, 1, 0),
  aperture = 0.1,
  clamp_value = Inf,
  filename = NA,
  backgroundhigh = "#80b4ff",
  backgroundlow = "#ffffff",
  shutteropen = 0,
  shutterclose = 1,
  camera_motion_blur = FALSE,
  shutter_speed = NULL,
  focal_distance = NULL,
  ortho_dimensions = c(1, 1),
  tonemap = "raw",
  bloom = TRUE,
  parallel = TRUE,
  bvh_type = "sah",
  environment_light = NULL,
  rotate_env = 0,
  intensity_env = 1,
  transparent_background = FALSE,
  debug_channel = "none",
  plot_scene = TRUE,
  progress = interactive(),
  verbose = FALSE,
  print_debug_info = FALSE,
  new_page = TRUE,
  integrator_type = "rtiow",
  screen_text = NULL,
  screen_line = NULL,
  camera = NULL,
  start_frame = 1,
  end_frame = NA,
  mode = c("auto", "image", "animation", "preview")
)

Arguments

scene	Tibble of object locations and properties.
width	Default '400'. Width of the render, in pixels.
height	Default '400'. Height of the render, in pixels.
fov	Default '20'. Field of view, in degrees. If this is '0', the camera will use an orthographic projection. The size of the plane used to create the orthographic projection is given in argument 'ortho_dimensions'. From '0' to '180', this uses a perspective projections. If this value is '360', a 360 degree environment image will be rendered.
samples	Default '100'. The maximum number of samples for each pixel. If this is a length-2 vector and the 'sample_method' is 'stratified', this will control the number of strata in each dimension. The total number of samples in this case will be the product of the two numbers.
camera_description_file	Default 'NA'. Filename of a camera description file for rendering with a realistic camera. Several camera files are built-in: '"50mm"','"wide"','"fisheye"', and '"telephoto"'.
preview	Default 'interactive()'. Whether to display a real-time progressive preview of the render. Press ESC to cancel the render. If 'deferred_render = TRUE', the preview stays interactive until the final render is explicitly started.
interactive	Default 'interactive()'. Whether the scene preview should be interactive. Camera movement orbits around the lookat point (unless the mode is switched to free flying), with the following control mapping: W = Forward, S = Backward, A = Left, D = Right, Q = Up, Z = Down, Shift-W/Shift-S = Pitch Camera Forward/Back, Shift-A/Shift-D = Roll Camera Left/Right, E = 2x Step Distance (max 128), C = 0.5x Step Distance, Up Key = Zoom In (decrease FOV), Down Key = Zoom Out (increase FOV), Left Key = Decrease Aperture, Right Key = Increase Aperture, 1 = Decrease Focal Distance, 2 = Increase Focal Distance, 3/4 = Rotate Environment Light, Right bracket/left bracket = Increase/Decrease Preview Exposure, Shift + right bracket/left bracket = Increase/Decrease shutter speed, Shift-Enter = Save Preview Snapshot, R = Reset Camera, Return = Toggle between deferred and final render if 'deferred_render = TRUE', TAB: Toggle Orbit Mode, Left Mouse Click: Set Look At and Focal Distance, Right Mouse Click: Set Look At. If the interactive preview window is wide enough, a status bar at the bottom shows the current camera, exposure, environment rotation, and keyframe state. K: Save Keyframe (at the conclusion of the render, this will create the 'ray_keyframes' data.frame in the global environment, which can be passed to 'generate_camera_motion()' to tween between those saved positions. L: Reset Camera to Last Keyframe (if set), Shift-L: Toggle keyframe path open/closed, < and >: Jump to previous/next keyframe, /: Delete current keyframe, M: Preview/cancel keyframe motion, F: Toggle Fast Travel Mode, B: Toggle Camera Motion Blur, H: Toggle Atmospheric Haze, Y: Toggle Altitude Queries (with 'sky_light()'). Haze requires altitude queries: enabling haze also enables altitude queries, and disabling altitude queries also disables haze. Each change restarts sampling. Initial step size is 1/20th of the distance from 'lookat' to 'lookfrom'. With integrator_type = "nee", clicks select the first point where accumulated volume opacity reaches 15%, or the first ordinary surface if reached sooner. Picking integrates extinction deterministically with a fixed shutter sample and a centered lens sample. Thin or empty regions allow selection of surfaces behind them; invisible container faces are skipped. Clicking the background without reaching this opacity turns perspective and panoramic cameras toward that direction, preserving focal distance and orbit radius. Orthographic background clicks leave the view unchanged. Selected surface and volume points remain the orbit center when rotating. Right clicking preserves the focal distance. Some options aren't available for all cameras. When using a realistic camera, the aperture and field of view cannot be changed from their initial settings.
deferred_render	Default 'FALSE'. If 'TRUE' and interactive preview is enabled, rayrender will keep updating the progressive preview until Return is pressed. Pressing Return toggles the full render in the same window; pressing Return again returns to deferred mode.
denoise	Default 'TRUE'. Whether to de-noise the final image and preview images. Note, this requires the free Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) library be installed on your system. Pre-compiled binaries can be installed from ppenimagedenoise.org, as well as . Linking during rayrender installation is done by defining the environment variable OIDN_PATH (set it in the .Renviron file by calling 'usethis::edit_r_environ()') to the top-level directory for OIDN (the directory containing the "lib", "bin", and "include" directories) and re-installing this package from source.
camera_scale	Default '1'. Amount to scale the camera up or down in size. Use this rather than scaling a scene.
iso	Default '100'. Camera exposure.
auto_exposure	Default 'FALSE'. If 'TRUE', automatically adjust the exposure with 'rayimage::render_exposure(auto = TRUE)'. If 'preview = TRUE', the preview window exposure is calibrated from the 90% luminance quantile of the first rendered frame.
film_size	Default '22', in 'mm' (scene units in 'm'. Size of the film if using a realistic camera, otherwise ignored.
min_variance	Default '0'. Minimum acceptable variance for a block of pixels for the adaptive sampler. Smaller numbers give higher quality images, at the expense of longer rendering times. If this is set to zero, the adaptive sampler will be turned off and the renderer will use the maximum number of samples everywhere.
min_adaptive_size	Default '8'. Width of the minimum block size in the adaptive sampler.
sample_method	Default 'sobol'. The type of sampling method used to generate random numbers. The other options are 'random' (worst quality but fastest), 'stratified' (only implemented for completion), 'sobol_blue' (best option for sample counts below 256), and 'sobol' (slowest but best quality, better than 'sobol_blue' for sample counts greater than 256). If 'samples > 256' and 'sobol_blue' is selected, the method will automatically switch to 'sample_method = "sobol"'.
max_depth	Default 'NA', automatically sets to 50. Maximum number of bounces a ray can make in a scene. Alternatively, if a debugging option is chosen, this sets the bounce to query the debugging parameter (only for some options).
roulette_active_depth	Default '100'. Number of ray bounces until a ray can stop bouncing via Russian roulette.
ambient_light	Default 'FALSE', unless there are no emitting objects in the scene. If 'TRUE', the background will be a gradient varying from 'backgroundhigh' directly up (+y) to 'backgroundlow' directly down (-y).
lookfrom	Default 'c(0,1,10)'. Location of the camera.
lookat	Default 'c(0,0,0)'. Location where the camera is pointed.
camera_up	Default 'c(0,1,0)'. Vector indicating the "up" position of the camera.
aperture	Default '0.1'. Aperture of the camera. Smaller numbers will increase depth of field, causing less blurring in areas not in focus.
clamp_value	Default 'Inf'. If a bright light or a reflective material is in the scene, occasionally there will be bright spots that will not go away even with a large number of samples. These can be removed (at the cost of slightly darkening the image) by setting this to a small number greater than 1.
filename	Default 'NULL'. If present, the renderer will write to the filename instead of the current device. Can write to JPEG/JPG, PNG, and high dynamic range EXR images. In the interactive preview, press Shift+Enter to save the current preview. A source filename with an extension produces numbered snapshots with the number inserted before the extension; otherwise snapshots are saved as 'rayrender_snapshot1.png', 'rayrender_snapshot2.png', and so on in the current directory.
backgroundhigh	Default '#80b4ff'. The "high" color in the background gradient. Can be either a hexadecimal code, or a numeric rgb vector listing three intensities between '0' and '1'.
backgroundlow	Default '#ffffff'. The "low" color in the background gradient. Can be either a hexadecimal code, or a numeric rgb vector listing three intensities between '0' and '1'.
shutteropen	Default '0'. Time at which the shutter is open. Only affects moving objects.
shutterclose	Default '1'. Time at which the shutter is open. Only affects moving objects.
camera_motion_blur	Default 'FALSE'. Whether to blur camera movement over the shutter interval. Press 'B' in interactive preview to toggle.
shutter_speed	Default 'NULL'. Optional render-time override for the selected camera's frame-relative shutter speed. A value of '1' samples the full frame-to-frame motion interval, '2' samples one-half, and '4' samples one-quarter. Higher values produce less motion blur. 'Inf' disables temporal motion blur. This does not affect exposure or brightness.
focal_distance	Default 'NULL', automatically set to the 'lookfrom-lookat' distance unless otherwise specified.
ortho_dimensions	Default 'c(1,1)'. Width and height of the orthographic camera. Will only be used if 'fov = 0'.
tonemap	Default 'raw', no tonemapping. Choose the tone mapping function, 'reinhard' scales values by their individual color channels 'color/(1+color)' and then performs the gamma adjustment. 'uncharted' uses the mapping developed for Uncharted 2 by John Hable. 'hbd' uses an optimized formula by Jim Hejl and Richard Burgess-Dawson.
bloom	Default 'TRUE'. Set to 'FALSE' to get the raw, pathtraced image. Otherwise, this performs a convolution of the HDR image of the scene with a sharp, long-tailed exponential kernel, which does not visibly affect dimly pixels, but does result in emitters light slightly bleeding into adjacent pixels. This provides an antialiasing effect for lights, even when tonemapping the image. Pass in a matrix to specify the convolution kernel manually, or a positive number to control the intensity of the bloom (higher number = more bloom).
parallel	Default 'TRUE'. If 'FALSE', it will use all available cores to render the image (or the number specified in 'options("cores")' or 'options("Ncpus")' if that option is not 'NULL').
bvh_type	Default '"sah"', "surface area heuristic". Method of building the bounding volume hierarchy structure used when rendering. Other option is "equal", which splits tree into groups of equal size.
environment_light	Default 'NULL'. An image to be used for the background for rays that escape the scene. Supports EXR, HDR, PNG, and JPEG images. For reusable scene lights and multiple environments, use infinite_light() and add_infinite_light(). This argument adds a light to any infinite lights already attached to the scene.
rotate_env	Default '0'. The number of degrees to rotate all infinite lights around the scene, in addition to their individual rotations.
intensity_env	Default '1'. The amount to increase the intensity of the environment lighting. Useful if using a LDR (JPEG or PNG) image as an environment map. Applies only to the 'environment_light' argument; scene lights have their own intensity.
transparent_background	Default 'FALSE'. If 'TRUE', any initial camera rays that escape the scene will be marked as transparent in the final image. If for a pixel some rays escape and others hit a surface, those pixels will be partially transparent.
debug_channel	Default 'none'. If 'depth', function will return a depth map of rays into the scene instead of an image. If 'normals', function will return an image of scene normals, mapped from 0 to 1. If 'uv', function will return an image of the uv coords. If 'variance', function will return an image showing the number of samples needed to take for each block to converge. If 'dpdu' or 'dpdv', function will return an image showing the differential 'u' and 'u' coordinates. If 'color', function will return the raw albedo values (with white for 'metal' and 'dielectric' materials).
plot_scene	Default 'TRUE'. Whether to plot the rendered scene.
progress	Default 'interactive()' if interactive session, 'FALSE' otherwise.
verbose	Default 'FALSE'. Prints information and timing information about scene construction and raytracing progress.
print_debug_info	Default 'FALSE'. This will print out additional information on the compilation environment with each render.
new_page	Default 'TRUE'. Whether to call 'grid::grid.newpage()' when plotting the image (if no filename specified). Set to 'FALSE' for faster plotting (does not affect render time).
integrator_type	Default '"rtiow"' (the algorithm specified in the book "Raytracing in One Weekend", a basic form of path guiding). Other options include '"nee"' (Next Event Estimation, with direct light sampling) and '"basic"' (basic pathtracing, for high sample reference renders and debugging only). With 'nee', surfaces and participating media use RGB null-scattering transport; nee is selected automatically for scenes containing sky_light() or attached media (including clouds and media inside instances), overriding rtiow or basic. See set_medium().
screen_text	Default 'NULL'. Optional screen-space text overlay created with 'screen_text()', or a list of 'screen_text()' outputs to draw in order.
screen_line	Default 'NULL'. Optional screen-space line overlay created with 'screen_line()', or a list of 'screen_line()' outputs to draw in order. Labels are anchored to 3D world-space points, projected through the current camera, and drawn after rendering so text size and justification are independent of scene scale and view distance.
camera	Default 'NULL'. Scene-attached camera name, '"all"', or a 'ray_camera' object created with 'camera()'.
start_frame	Default '1'. First camera frame to render when using an animated camera.
end_frame	Default 'NA'. Last camera frame to render when using an animated camera. If 'NA', renders through the final frame.
mode	Default '"auto"'. Rendering mode. '"auto"' renders a still image for static cameras and an animation for animated cameras.

Value

A pathtraced image to the current device, or an image saved to a file. Invisibly returns the array (containing either debug data or the RGB).

Examples

# Generate a large checkered sphere as the ground
  scene = generate_ground(depth = -0.5,
                          material = diffuse(color = "white", checkercolor = "darkgreen"))
  render_scene(scene, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16, sample_method = "sobol")
  # Add a sphere to the center
  scene = scene |>
    add_object(sphere(x = 0, y = 0, z = 0, radius = 0.5, material = diffuse(color = c(1, 0, 1))))
  render_scene(scene, fov = 20, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16)
  # Add a marbled cube
  scene = scene |>
    add_object(cube(x = 1.1, y = 0, z = 0, material = diffuse(noise = 3)))
  render_scene(scene, fov = 20, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16)
  # Add a metallic gold sphere, using stratified sampling for a higher quality render
  # We also add a light, which turns off the default ambient lighting
  scene = scene |>
    add_object(sphere(x = -1.1, y = 0, z = 0, radius = 0.5,
                      material = metal(color = "gold", fuzz = 0.1))) |>
    add_object(sphere(y=10,z=-13,radius=2,material=light(intensity=40)))
  render_scene(scene, fov = 20, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16)
  # Lower the number of samples to render more quickly (here, we also use only one core).
  render_scene(scene, samples = 4, parallel = FALSE)
  # Add a floating R plot using the iris dataset as a png onto a floating 2D rectangle
  tempfileplot = tempfile()
  png(filename = tempfileplot, height = 400, width = 800)
  plot(iris$Petal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width, col = iris$Species, pch = 18, cex = 4)
  dev.off()
  image_array = aperm(png::readPNG(tempfileplot), c(2, 1, 3))
  scene = scene |>
    add_object(xy_rect(x = 0, y = 1.1, z = 0, xwidth = 2, angle = c(0, 0, 0),
                       flipped = TRUE,
                       material = diffuse(image_texture = image_array)))
  render_scene(scene, fov = 20, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16)
  # Move the camera
  render_scene(scene, lookfrom = c(7, 1.5, 10), lookat = c(0, 0.5, 0), fov = 15, parallel = TRUE)
  # Change the background gradient to a firey sky
  render_scene(scene, lookfrom = c(7, 1.5, 10), lookat = c(0, 0.5, 0), fov = 15,
               backgroundhigh = "orange", backgroundlow = "red", parallel = TRUE,
               ambient = TRUE,
               samples = 16)
  # Increase the aperture to blur objects that are further from the focal plane.
  render_scene(scene, lookfrom = c(7, 1.5, 10), lookat = c(0, 0.5, 0), fov = 15,
               aperture = 1, parallel = TRUE, samples = 16)
  # We can also capture a 360 environment image by setting `fov = 360` (can be used for VR).
  # The left edge of the image is directly where the camera is pointing--we point the image
  # backwards so the full cornell box is in the "center" of the environment map.
  generate_cornell() |>
    add_object(ellipsoid(x = 555 / 2, y = 100, z = 555 / 2, a = 50, b = 100, c = 50,
                          material = metal(color = "lightblue"))) |>
    add_object(cube(x = 100, y = 130 / 2, z = 200, xwidth = 130, ywidth = 130, zwidth = 130,
                     material = diffuse(checkercolor = "purple",
                                        checkerperiod = 30), angle = c(0, 10, 0))) |>
    add_object(pig(x = 100, y = 190, z = 200, scale = 40, angle = c(0, 30, 0))) |>
    add_object(sphere(x = 420, y = 555 / 8, z = 100, radius = 555 / 8,
                       material = dielectric(color = "orange"))) |>
    add_object(xz_rect(x = 555 / 2, z = 555 / 2, y = 1, xwidth = 555, zwidth = 555,
                       material = glossy(checkercolor = "white",
                                         checkerperiod = 10, color = "dodgerblue"))) |>
    render_scene(lookfrom = c(278, 278, -10), lookat = c(278, 278, -300), clamp_value = 100,
                 fov = 360,  samples = 16, width = 800, height = 800)
  # Spin the camera around the scene, decreasing the number of samples to render faster. To make
  # an animation, specify the a filename in `render_scene` for each frame and use the `av` package
  # or ffmpeg to combine them all into a movie.
  t = 1:9
  xpos = 10 * sin(t * 18 * pi / 180 + pi / 2)
  zpos = 10 * cos(t * 18 * pi / 180 + pi / 2)
  image_output = list()
  for (i in 1:9) {
    image_output[[i]] = render_scene(scene, samples = 16, plot_scene = FALSE,
                 lookfrom = c(xpos[i], 1.5, zpos[i]), lookat = c(0, 0.5, 0), parallel = TRUE)
  }
  rayimage::plot_image_grid(image_output, dim = c(3,3) )

rayrender documentation built on Sept. 16, 2026, 9:08 a.m.