A Light-weight, Offscreen and Fast 3D Model Renderer

This code is designed for building previews of 3D models. So we aim at rendering many formats of 3D models robustly with acceptable quality.

Main Features

1. A light-weight offscreen renderer in C++.
2. Fast to run.
3. Run in command line.
4. Support over 40+ common 3D formats such as OBJ, OFF and COLLADA.
5. Support materials and textures.

Installation

Linux (tested on Ubunut 14.04)

First, install dependencies by apt-get:

sudo apt-get install libglew-dev libdevil-dev libassimp-dev freeglut3-dev libpng3 libsysfs-dev libudev-dev

Second, install Mesa3D (>=11.0.7):

wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/11.0.7/mesa-11.0.7.tar.gz
tar xvf mesa-11.0.7.tar.gz
cd mesa-11.0.7
./configure --enable-osmesa --disable-driglx-direct
make -j20
sudo make install

By default, this will install OSMesa to /usr/local.

Note You may have other versions of Mesa3D installed before. Then you need to uninstall/remove/disable old versions, or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Old versions of OSMesa might be found in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.

It is suggested that you set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH as follows:

set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Third, build the renderer by running

git clone git@github.com:ShapeNet/LightweightRenderer.git
cd LightweightRenderer
make

This will create an executable named render

Lastly, test your build by running

./render airplane.obj airplane.png

This should generate an image named airplane.png as below:

Usage

run render and help message appears.

Note

Normal smoothing is not enabled. This is to avoid bad rendering when surface normals are incorrect.