Visionaray

A C++ based, cross platform ray tracing library

Getting Visionaray

The Visionaray git repository can be cloned using the following commands:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/szellmann/visionaray.git

An existing working copy can be updated using the following commands:

git pull
git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build requirements

C++14 compliant compiler (tested with g++-7.4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 x86_64, tested with clang-900.0.39.2 on Mac OS X 10.13, tested with clang-1200.0.32.28 on Mac OS X 11.0.1 arm-64 (M1), tested with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 VC14 for x64)
CMake version 3.1.3 or newer
OpenGL
GLEW
NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit version 7.0 or newer (optional)
Libraries need to be installed as developer packages containing C/C++ header files
The OpenGL and GLEW dependency can optionally be relaxed by setting VSNRAY_GRAPHICS_API=None with CMake

In order to compile the viewer and the examples, the following additional packages are needed or recommended:

Boost
GLUT or FreeGLUT
Libjpeg (optional)
Libpng (optional)
LibTIFF (optional)
OpenEXR (optional)
Ptex (optional)

Building the Visionaray library and viewer

Linux and Mac OS X

It is strongly recommended to build Visionaray in release mode, as the source code relies heavily on function inlining by the compiler, and executables may be extremely slow without that optimization. It is also recommended to supply an architecture flag that corresponds to the CPU architecture you are targeting.

cd visionaray
mkdir build
cd build

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-march=native"
make
make install

The headers, libraries and viewer will then be located in the standard install path of your operating system (usually /usr/local).

See the Getting Started Guide and the Troubleshooting section in the Wiki for further information.

Visionaray Viewer

Visionaray comes with a viewer that supports a number of different 3D file formats. The viewer is primarily targeted at developers, as a tool for debugging and testing. After being installed, the viewer can be invoked using the following command:

vsnray-viewer <file>

where file is either a path to a wavefront .obj file, a .ply file, or a .pbrt file.

Documentation

Documentation can be found in the Wiki.

Source Code Organization

Library

Visionaray is a template library, so that most algorithms are implemented in header files located under include/visionaray.

include/visionaray/math: GLSL-inspired math templates, wrappers for SIMD types, geometric primitives
include/visionaray/texture: texture management templates and texture access routines
include/visionaray: misc. ray tracing templates, BVHs, render targets, etc.

Visionaray can optionally interoperate with graphics and GPGPU APIs. Interoperability with the respective libraries is compiled into the Visionaray library. When GPU interoperability isn't required, chances are high that you don't need to link with Visionaray but can rather use it as a header only library.

include/visionaray/cuda/, src/visionaray/cuda: CUDA interoperability classes
include/visionaray/gl, src/visionaray/gl: OpenGL(ES) interoperability classes

Files in detail/ subfolders are not part of the public API. Code in namespace detail contains private implementation. Template class implementations go into files ending with .inl, which are included at the bottom of the public interface header file.

Applications

Visionaray comes with a viewer (see above) and a set of examples. Those are found in

src/viewer: visionaray viewer
src/examples: visionaray examples

Common library

The viewer and the examples link with the Visionaray-common library that provides functionality such as windowing classes or mouse interaction. The Visionaray-common library is not part of the public API and interfaces may change between releases.

src/common: private library used by the viewer and example applications

Third-party libraries

src/3rdparty: third-party code goes in here

The viewer and the examples use the following third-party libraries (the Visionaray library can be built without these dependencies):

CmdLine library to handle command line arguments in the viewer and examples. (Archived, TODO: port to CmdLine2.)
dear imgui library for GUI elements in the viewer and examples.
PBRT-Parser library to load 3D models in pbrt format.
RapidJSON library for parsing JSON scene descriptions.
tinyply library to load Stanford PLY models.

Revision History

See the file CHANGELOG.md for updates on feature addition and removals, bug fixes and general changes.

Citation

If you use Visionaray or some of its code for your scientific project, it would be nice if you cited this paper:

@inproceedings{zellmann:visionaray,
author = {Zellmann, Stefan and Wickeroth, Daniel and Lang, Ulrich},
title = {Visionaray: A Cross-Platform Ray Tracing Template Library},
booktitle = {2017 IEEE 10th Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS)},
year = {2017},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {1-8},
}

License

Visionaray is licensed under the MIT License (MIT)

tjachmann / visionaray