nib

Summary

nib is a renderer created for research purposes. It is designed to be as performant as possible without compromising the ability for a user to hack around with the source code, especially with regards to implementing different sampling strategies. It is written in Rust and uses Rayon for parallelization, which calculates the value of each pixel as a unit of work.

Usage

You can find the available command line flags and usage information with

nib --help

You can find example scene files in the data/ folder.

A minimal scene looks like this:

{
    "objects": [],
    "acceleration_structure": "ObjectList",
    "camera": {
        "Pinhole": {
            "origin": {
                "x": 0.0,
                "y": 0.0,
                "z": 0.0
            },
            "horizontal": {
                "x": 4.0,
                "y": 0.0,
                "z": 0.0
            },
            "vertical": {
                "x": 0.0,
                "y": 2.0,
                "z": 0.0
            },
            "lower_left": {
                "x": -2.0,
                "y": -1.0,
                "z": -1.0
            }
        }
    },
    "background": [
        0,
        0,
        0
    ],
    "samples_per_pixel": 100
}

You can use JSON, YAML, or RON (I use serde for serialization support). For now, the scene specification is subject to change as I develop the renderer.

Development

I'm using Rust, so the usual cargo commands apply when building, testing, checking, etc.

This gets tested on Windows, MacOS, and Linux on Azure pipelines, but I only use this on Linux, so Linux will likely have the best support. I can't offer any guarantees for other platforms, but will ensure that CI is passing and I am open to tackling issues that people may have on other platforms. Feel free to send a PR or file an issue!