This program is a first look into rendering. It can produce images using different rendering algorithms, like the path tracer. Since the program output is a PNG image and a PFM file, it can also works as a PFM to PNG converter, performing tone mapping and gamma correction if necessary.
This code is written in Nim and developed during the course "Numeric calculation for photorealistic images generation" held by professor Maurizio Tomasi at Unimi.
The code has been tested with stable and devel Nim versions from 2.0.2 on, with Ubuntu 22.04.4 or higher.
To use it, the installation of nim-simplepng and cligen libraries is required. The installation through nimble package manager is advised. Therefore, you can simply run:
nimble install <LIBRARY_NAME>
To use this program you have to compile it using:
nimble build
and then run it via
./project <COMMAND> <ARGUMENTS>
Two commands are available: pfm2png and render. Keep reading to learn about them or run
./project <COMMAND> -h
for a quick guide.
Use this option to convert an INPUT_PFM_FILE to an OUTPUT_PNG_FILE.
To use it run
./project pfm2png <INPUT_PFM_FILE> <OUTPUT_PNG_FILE>
To perform tone mapping and/or gamma correction during the conversion, you can specify <GAMMA> and/or <A_VALUE> using
./project pfm2png -a=<A_VALUE> -g=<GAMMA> <INPUT_PFM_FILE> <OUTPUT_PNG_FILE>
These are optional arguments so you can either specify them both, just one of them or none of them as in the previous case.
Here are some example of the conversion of the file memorial.pfm using different values of <GAMMA> and <A_VALUE>.
A_VALUE=0.15 GAMMA=1.0 |
A_VALUE=0.25 GAMMA=1.0 |
A_VALUE=0.15 GAMMA=2.0 |
A_VALUE=0.25 GAMMA=2.0 |
Use this option to create an image. The scene disposition has to be written in a txt file, using an easy lenguage we created and which basic syntax is explained in this file.
All the txt files in examples/ are written in that lenguage, so you can see them as references.
To use this program as a ray-tracer and produce the demo image run
./project render examples/demo.txt
As in the previous case, it is possible to add some optional arguments to the command to adjust some aspects of the generated image. To learn about the optional parameters run:
./project render -h
Here is the default demo image produced:
With this code it is also possible to produce an animation with the camera rotates around the scene.
To create the frames you can install parallel and then run
parallel -j <NUM_CORES> ./generate_image.sh '{}' ::: $(seq 0 359) <txt_scene_description>
All the images used as frames for the animation will be saved in the animation/ directory.
If you have ffmpeg installed on your pc, to create the animation you just have to run
./generate_animation.sh
Some examples of what can be done with our code are shown below. All the txt scene description are in the examples/ directory.
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The code is released under the GPL3 License. See the file LICENSE.md for more information.