minirender

A useless software rasterizer for 3D meshes using a z-buffer.

Only requires the ASL 1.11.3+ library (automatically downloaded and built if needed).

It interpolates normals to produce smooth Blinn-Phong diffuse and specular illumination.

(image rendered from the model attached to release 0.1.3 in around 30 ms.)

Current features

• Rasterization of triangle meshes, using OpenGL-like modelview and projection matrices
• Blinn-Phong illumination
• Rasterization interpolates vertex positions, normals and texture coordinates (can create smooth shading)
• Ability to save images in PPM format (very simple and not needing 3rd party libraries)
• Triangle clipping at the near plane
• Textures (PPM only)
• Loaders for:
  • STL (binary or text)
  • OBJ/MTL
  • X3D (IndexedFaceSet and IndexedTriangleSet meshes with scene hierarchy and materials)
• Simple hierarchical scene with meshes and transforms
• Only one point light in world-coordinates

Possible future features

• Additional loader(s) (maybe PLY)
• Normals computation with autosmoothing
• More lights including spots

Console output

The included sample can render on the console in real time. The -console option enables this, and -t indicates 10 seconds of animation.

render -console! -t 10 scene.obj