DocSavage / ANARI-SDK

ANARI SDK

ANARI-SDK

This repository contains the source for the ANARI API SDK. This includes:

• Front-end library
• API utilties and helpers (mostly for implementations)
• Example device implementation (not for production use)
• Example applications
• Interactive sample viewer
• Unit tests
• Regression tests

The 1.0 provisional ANARI specification can be found on the Khronos website here.

Please note that the example device, sample applications, and tests do not yet fully cover the entire specification and are still a work-in-progress. These are expected to be completed in full on or before the official 1.0 ANARI specification release.

The SDK is tested on Linux, but is also intended to be usable on other operating systems such as macOS and Windows.

If you find any problems with the SDK, please do not hesitate to open an issue on this project!

Building the SDK

The repository uses CMake 3.11+ to build the library, example implementation, sample apps, and tests. For example, to build (must be in a separate directory from the source directory), you can do:

% cd /path/to/anari
% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake ..

Using a tool like ccmake or cmake-gui will let you see which options are available to enable. The following CMake options are offered:

• BUILD_SHARED_LIBS : build everything as shared libraries or static libraries
• BUILD_TESTING : build unit and regression test binaries
• BUILD_EXAMPLES : build example device and example applications
• BUILD_VIEWER : build viewer too (needs glfw3) if building examples

Once built, the library can be installed via the install target created by CMake. This can be invoked from your build directory with (on any platform):

% cmake --build . -t install

Using the SDK after install with CMake

The ANARI SDK exports CMake targets for the main front-end library and utilities helper library. The targets which are exported are as follows:

• anari::anari : main library target to link with libanari
• anari::anari_utilities : library target which adds implementation helpers

These targets can be found with CMake via find_package(anari). There is an example provided to demonstrate what consuming the ANARI SDK with CMake looks like here.

Running the examples

The basic tutorial app (built by default) uses the example device as an example, which can be run with:

% ./anariTutorial

The viewer application (enabled with BUILD_VIEWER=ON) by default uses the environment library, which reads ANARI_LIBRARY as an environment variable to get the library to load. For example it can be run with:

% export ANARI_LIBRARY=example
% ./anariViewer /path/to/some/file.obj

Alternatively, either --library or -l can be used to override the library to be loaded on the command line directly.

The regression test binary used to render the test scenes without a window (results saved out as PNG images) uses the same mechanisms as the viewer to select/override which library is loaded at runtime.

Using the provided ExampleDevice implementation

The example device implementation is provided as a starting point for users exploring the SDK and implementors to see how the API might be implemented. It currently uses OpenMP multi-threading for simplicity and is not built to be a robust and fast rendering engine. Users should look to use hardware-optimized ANARI implementations which are shipped independently from the SDK.