Visionaray - A Cross-Platform Real-Time Ray Tracing Kernel Framework
Visionaray is a C++-based real-time ray tracing library.
Visionaray's strengths are:
- Open Source: Visionaray is licensed under the flexible MIT license.
- Cross-platform: Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, Xilinx FPGAs (work in progress). No duplicate code, all platforms targeted from the same C++ code.
- High flexibility through kernel- and scheduler-based architecture. Kernels describe what a ray does, schedulers describe how a ray is spawned.
- Built-in kernels: simple ray casting, "Whitted"-style ray tracing, "Kajiya"-style path tracing.
- Built-in schedulers: simple (scanline, single-threaded), tiled (multi-threaded), TBB, CUDA.
- User can write custom schedulers and kernels.
- Built-in performance primitives: SIMD short vector library, fast SBVH builder and traversal, texture support, physically based materials, etc.
- VR support: Visionaray comes with a plugin for the virtual reality renderer OpenCOVER.
Download Visionaray: http://github.com/szellmann/visionaray
Documentation: https://github.com/szellmann/visionaray/wiki
Tutorial Series on medium.com: https://medium.com/@stefanzellmann
Facebook Site: https://www.facebook.com/visionaray
Visionaray Gallery
- Path traced global illumination with diffuse interreflection.
- Can run on the CPU and the GPU.
- Physically based, complex materials based on microfacet distributions.
- Ray tracing in VR with textures, shadows and reflections.
- VRML models, scene graph and dynamic scenes.
Software Development
Visionaray is mainly developed by Stefan Zellmann and his student co-workers. You study computer science and want to become part of the team? Then contact:
Dr. Stefan Zellmann
Weyertal 121
50931 Cologne
zellmann(at)uni-koeln.de
+49 (0) 221 470 89615
Legal notice:
- The dragon and teapot data sets are common test objects used by the CG community and can e.g. be obtained from here: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml
- Floops is a VRML data set that was available from SGI.