SunFlow – rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis.

Last Updated on October 17, 2023

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.

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 absorption)
  • 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.

Website: sunflow.sourceforge.net
Support:
Developer: Christopher Kulla
License: MIT License

Sunflow is written in Java. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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