Eldr ("fire" in Old Norse) is my new hobby project. After working with Mitsuba 2 in my master's thesis project, I was inspired to create something similar on my own to learn more about computer graphics. In contrast to Mitsuba, I intend to make Eldr more GUI oriented, making it possible to set up scenes as you go, and provide more immediate visual feedback like most commercial renderers do. However, I want to keep the "research spirit" of Mitsuba, making it as modular as I can to allow swapping out components and trying new rendering techniques.
I will try to keep cross platform compatibility in mind while developing Eldr, but it is not a priority in the beginning. I will be developing on Linux and the build instructions etc. will therefore be Linux(debian)-oriented to begin with.
Eldr is in early stage development and I am still working on the Vulkan backend. I knew Vulkan would be overkill for a project like this but I want to learn it so it will take the time it takes. I am nearly done refactoring the Vulkan code and integrating ImGui. After that I need to write some shaders and work on the scene representation and then I can start path tracing (probably).
A possibly out-of-date list of required software:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential ninja-build meson pkg-config python3 \
python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-wheel libvulkan-dev xcb libxcb-xkb-dev \
wayland-protocols
Meson provides additional dependencies such as libpng, glfw etc.
For debugging:
sudo apt-get install vulkan-validationlayers-dev spirv-tools
Some other notes:
- For initial testing, I've been using the Viking room model by nigelgoh (CC BY 4.0) At the moment of writing, there are still hardcoded references to these files, and they will probably stay until I'm more finished with the vulkan backend. The files can also be downloaded from the the Vulkan Tutorial.
$ meson setup build
$ cd build
$ ninja
I have been using glslc to compile some
basic shaders. Eldr will look for the in assets/shaders/.
glslc src/shaders/main.vert -o assets/shaders/main.vert.spv
glslc src/shaders/main.frag -o assets/shaders/main.frag.spv