Visionaray is a cross-platform ray tracing framework.
There’s also a viewer available. It supports a number of 3D file formats. The viewer is primarily targeted at developers, as a tool for debugging and testing.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Cross-platform: Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, Xilinx FPGAs (work in progress). No duplicate code, all platforms targeted from the same C++ code.
- High flexibility through kernel- and scheduler-based architecture. Kernels describe what a ray does, schedulers describe how a ray is spawned.
- Built-in kernels: simple ray casting, “Whitted”-style ray tracing, “Kajiya”-style path tracing.
- Built-in schedulers: simple (scanline, single-threaded), tiled (multi-threaded), TBB, CUDA.
- User can write custom schedulers and kernels.
- Built-in performance primitives: SIMD short vector library, fast SBVH builder and traversal, texture support, physically based materials, etc.
- VR support: Visionaray comes with a plugin for the virtual reality renderer OpenCOVER.
Website: vis.uni-koeln.de/forschung
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Stefan Zellmann
License: MIT License
Visionaray is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Ray Tracing Software | |
|---|---|
| POV-Ray | Full-featured ray tracer |
| Blender | 3D content creation suite with a huge range of uses |
| McXtrace | Monte Carlo Xray Tracing for simulation X-ray beamlines and experiments |
| McStas | Simulator for neutron scattering instruments and experiments |
| Embree | High-performance ray tracing library |
| LuxCoreRender | Rendering system for physically correct image synthesis |
| pbrt | Physically based ray tracing system |
| OSPRay | Scalable and portable ray tracing engine |
| BRL-CAD | Combinatorial Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system |
| Visionaray | C++ ray tracing template library |
| MantaRay | Advanced renderer using modern rendering techniques |
| YafaRay | Montecarlo raytracing engine |
| Tachyon | Parallel / multiprocessor ray tracing system |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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