NVIDIA MDL SDK (with Slang Modules)

Building

This project has been tested only on Windows.

All parts of the MDL-SDK can be built through configurations generated by CMake. The recommended way to do this is through the CMake GUI. Below are some notes which may address issues that arise from configuring CMake.

• It requires vcpkg to manage and retrieve dependencies.
  • If CMake cannot find the vcpkg toolchain automatically, set CMAKE_TOOL_CHAIN file as the path to the vcpkg binary.
  • If vcpkg was cloned locally, then set CMAKE_TOOL_CHAIN to <PATH TO VCPKG>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake.
• Boost and OpenImageIO are additional dependencies, which should be installed with vcpkg:
  • Use the following commands:

    vcpkg install --triplet=x64-windows-static boost-any
    vcpkg install --triplet=x64-windows-static boost-uuid
    vcpkg install --triplet=x64-windows-static openimageio[gif,openjpeg,tools,webp]
    

• GLFW is an additional dependency:
  • Installing the glfw3 package from vcpkg might work.
  • Otherwise, build AND install glfw3 from source (with CMake) and set glfw3_DIR to <GLFW BUILD DIR>/install/x64-Release/lib/cmake/glfw3
• The following options can be disabled for the purposes of this project:
  • MDL_BUILD_DOCUMENTATION
  • MDL_ENABLE_CUDA_EXAMPLES
  • MDL_ENABLE_OPENGL_EXAMPLES
  • MDL_ENABLE_QT_EXAMPLES
• Python (3.12+ works) should be installed in your system.
• DXC is required:
  • Set DXR_DIR to the folder which contains the bin, lib and include directories.
  • See the release page to download DXC.
• LLVM is required (12.0.1 works)
  • If CMake is not automatically finding clang_PATH then set it as the path to the clang executable.
  • The LLVM version must be the SAME as the clang version; otherwise, there may be errors with examples being unable to parse libbsdf.
• If there are linking errors with OGLCompiler.lib, then its safe to remove all references to it from any CMake files
  • This should already be done, but regardless this library should not be needed

To interface with Slang, download the latest Slang release and extract it into the root directory of this repository. This is necesary for the DXR and df_vulkan examples below.

Examples

DXR

Notes:

• DXR app requires 32 derivative samples from textures: --enable_derivs --tex_res 32

df_vulkan