PtahRenderer

A small software graphics renderer. Offline and online demos available on macOS and Linux (tested on Ubuntu). See Programs for requirements and build instructions. Associated blog post here.

Written with the help of (among other resources) :

• Interactive Computer Graphics - A Top-Down Approach, 2012, E. Angel & D.Shreiner
• Introduction to Computer Graphics course, M. Pauly, EPFL 2015
• How OpenGL works, D. V. Sokolov, available at github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer
• Triangle rasterization in practice and the following posts, F. Giesen, available here
• Rasterization: a Practical Implementation, , available at scratchapixel.com
• How to write a (software) 3d polygon pipeline, C. Bloom, available here

Programs

The project is composed of two library modules, and three programs:

• PtahRenderer contains the internal logic to perform transformation, rasterization and clipping,... along with primitive types.
• PtahRendererDemo contains the scene, the objects and shaders, and handles camera movements and animations.
• PtahRendererDemoOffline is a command-line utility that renders one frame of the scene and saves it to a .tga file in the renders/ directory
• PtahRendererDemoOnline is a macOS Cocoa application (that can only be built using Xcode), performing real-time rendering with mouse interactions (scroll to zoom, drag to rotate around the scene).
• PtahRendererDemoOpenGL performs the same tasks as PtahRendererDemoOnline but relies on OpenGL 3 and GLFW 3 to display the output of the renderer in real-time.

Apart from PtahRendererDemoOnline, everything can be compiled using the Swift Package Manager on both macOS (tested on macOS 10.12) and Linux (tested on Ubuntu 16.04).

swift build -c release -Xlinker -L/usr/local/lib

For PtahRendererDemoOpenGL, GLFW 3 needs to be installed in /usr/local and is accessed through a thin wrapper (macOS and Linux versions). OpenGL is also used through a wrapper, SGLOpenGL, that mainly provides platform independance and types simplification (because of Swift handling of GLenum among other things). If you want to compile the OpenGL demo in Xcode, do a first compilation with the Package Manager so the dependencies are downloaded and setup.

Done

• General setup
• Mesh loading (OBJ with vertices, normals, texture coordinates, faces)
• Texture loading (PNG, 1-3-4 channels, supports wrapping and clamping)
• Line drawing (using Bresenham’s line drawing algorithm)
• Wireframe drawing for triangular faces
• Triangles rasterization
• Z-buffer
• View and world matrices
• Back faces culling
• Projection matrix
• Primitives clipping
• Shaders (vertex, fragment)
• Multi pass (for AO (SSAO or pre-computation), shadow maps, deferred shading)
• Offline demo (both platforms)
• Real-time demo (both platforms)

To do

• Optimizations...