Sunflow

Sunflow Global Illumination Rendering System (Sunflow) is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. It is built around a flexible ray tracing core and an extensible object-oriented design.

It was created as a framework for experimenting with global illumination algorithms and new surface shading models.

Sunflow 0.07.2

Price Free to download Size 1.1MB License MIT License Developer Christopher Kulla Website sunflow.sourceforge.net System Requirements Java Runtime Environment Janino Support Sites: Documentation, Forums, SourceForge Project Page Selected Reviews:

Features include:

• Fully extensible architecture. Almost every aspect of the renderer can be customized
• User extensible features are exposed as interfaces, making it easy to integrate into existing applications
• Simple API for procedural scene creation
• Direct Illumination with soft shadows from area lights
• Adaptive sampling of area light sources
• Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling architecture: all sampling operations are fully deterministic
• Depth of field
• Camera motion blur
• Multi-threading
• Photon Mapping (for global illumination and caustics)
• Run-time compilation of shaders (via Janino)
• Lazy processing of tesselation, acceleration structure building and texture loading
• Lightmap generation (render to texture)
• Instancing (many copies of the same object take up very little additional memory)

• Bucket renderer
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing (over and under sampling)
  • Bucket based rendering (programmable ordering)
  • Multi-pixel image filtering
• Progressive refinement renderer
• Texture mapping (JPG, PNG, TGA, HDR loaders)
• Bump mapping
• Normal mapping

• Custom scene format: basic translators exist for 3ds files and Blender
• Output formats: HDR, PNG, TGA, OpenEXR (tiled only)
• Written 100% in Java
• Simple Swing GUI with progressive rendering display and console.
• Simple Swing display driver that can be embedded in other applications.

• Primitives
  • Triangle mesh
  • Hair curves
  • Disk
  • Sphere
  • Torus
  • Banchoff surface
  • Bezier patches (built-in teapot and gumbo models) - tesselated on demand
  • Infinite plane
  • Cube-grid (eg: Menger Sponge)
  • Cornell Box
  • Julia Quaternion Fractal
  • Particle Surface (large sets of spheres)
  • Programmable (surfaces can be tesseleated by Java code compiled and executed on demand)
• Cameras lenses
  • Pinhole
  • Spherical (produces a longitude/lattitude environment map
  • Thinlens (produces depth of field effects, including bokeh)
  • Fisheye
• Ray intersection accelerators
  • SAH KD-Tree
  • Bounding Interval Hierarchy (paper)
  • Uniform grid
  • Bounding volume hierarchy
  • Null (for simple scenes)
• Surface shaders
  • Diffuse
  • Mirror
  • Glass (with absorbtion)
  • Phong (with glossy reflections)
  • Ambient occlusion
  • Shiny diffuse
  • Anisotropic ward
  • Wireframe
  • Programmable (in Java - compiled during scene loading)
• Surface modifiers
  • Bump mapping
  • Normal mapping
• Light sources
  • Point light
  • Directional spotlight
  • Triangle area light (paper)
  • Image-based infinite area light
  • Physically based sun/sky system (paper)
• Photon mapping engines
  • KD-Tree
  • Grid based
• Image filters
  • Box
  • Triangle
  • Gaussian
  • Blackman Harris
  • Catmull-Rom
  • Mitchell
  • Lanczos
  • Sinc
• Bucket orderings
  • Hilbert
  • Spiral
  • Row
  • Column
  • Diagonal
  • Random
• Global illumination engines
  • Irradiance caching
  • "Instant GI" - based on "Illumination in the Presence of Weak Singularities" (Thomas Kollig, Alexander Keller)
  • Path tracing
  • Fake ambient term
  • Ambient occlusion

Last Updated Wednesday, August 12 2009 @ 01:29 PM EDT