Yet another photorealistic renderer with great ambitions
spectre-light is a photorealistic unbiased physically-based renderer. It inherits its base structure from the great pbrt by M.Pharr, W. Jakob and G. Humphreys, but it is slowly diverging from it. The long term goal of this project is a GPU-based physically based renderer, however, in order to reach that point, first a solid CPU renderer will be created and then GPU support will be added.
The road ahead is long and for this reason the file Roadmap.md contains the list of features that will be implemented during the way
These instruction will get you a running copy of spectre-light in your machine in the fastest possible way.
Under Linux, spectre-light uses cmake as a build system, so this is the only mandatory dependency. Under Windows or macOS it is necessary to have installed Visual Studio with C++ support and Xcode respectively.
Although no dependency is strictly required, with the exception of cmake under Linux, having libjpeg, libpng or libtiff installed enables support of respectively JPEG, PNG and TIFF images. Without those libs, spectre-light is limited to read and write only NetPBM, Windows Bitmap and Truevision TGA files.
Here are the build instructions for spectre-light, assuming the build tools are already installed
mkdir build/
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" ..
make
Although macOS can use cmake aswell, the Xcode project has been provided
with the build already configured. The same applies for Windows which has its
own Visual Studio project under the visualstudio/ folder
After building spectre-light it is possible to run it with the following command
spectre-rgb input.txt
or with
spectre-full input.txt
input.txt is an ASCII file containing the description of the scene that will be rendered.
Under Windows drag-dropping the input file over the executable works aswell.
The input file format is explained here.
spectre-light supports .obj files for scene and models, .tga .ppm and .bmp for textures.
As already said, if the libjpg, libpng and libtiff are found, additional image formats such as .jpg, .png and .tiff can be used.
.mtl is not available as an obj companion file for materials due to its tremendous binding with the Phong illumination model. Check the section Missing .mtl of the aforementioned input readme for more information.
This project uses Doxygen in order to generate the documentation.
If you have doxygen installed, cmake will detect it and produce the target doc. After
that the only thing left to do is to invoke the following command
make doc
in order to generate the html documentation of the project
Unit testing is done with Google Test under Linux and thus it is required as additional dependency. In order to run the tests the following commands have to be issued
mkdir build_tests/
cd build_tests/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Coverage" ..
make runTests
Then, running the newly created executable runTests will run every test
in the suite.
If gnuplot is also installed and the project is
built with cmake, the target make distributions
will generate some pdfs with the distributions of the various sampling routines.
Under macOS and Windows, testing is done with the default testing suite,
and tests are already configured in the provided .sln/.xcproj file
spectre-light is released under the terms of the GNU GPLv3 License. You may find the content of the license in the LICENSE.txt file.
The images in this README are rendered with models courtesy of the Stanford scanning repository