Software 3D Renderer project

A project written in C (C99) & SDL to explore writing a software 3D renderer from scratch.

It is based on the following online course by Gustavo Pezzi: https://courses.pikuma.com/courses/learn-computer-graphics-programming

Platforms

This project uses the GNU C Compiler toolchain and should theorically work on those that supports and SDL.

Linux

Compilation should be straight forward without configuration if all dev dependencies are installed such as make, gcc, libsdl2-dev and optionally tcc aka TinyCC. I worked on this project exclusively on WSL (Ubuntu) and MSVC, so have not tested it yet in a non-virtualised Linux environment.

Windows

Windows 11: WSL2 and WSLg

You can build and run project in a distro of your choice using WSL2 and WSLg on Windows 11.

Windows 10: WSL2 and VcXsrv

You can build and run project in a distro of your choice using WSL2 and VcXsrv on Windows 10. Using VcXsrv will require some configuration in your distro. Some caveats apply in full screen mode in SDL so you can edit the code to use windowed mode instead.

Windows using MSVC

I am exploring the project in Visual Studio C++ on Windows at the same time here: https://github.com/ivan-fourie/3drenderer-win

Windows using MinGW (Experimental)

You will need to make sure to install the MinGW Development Libraries from https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php

Running in MinGW will require some tweaking with the compiler flags:

gcc -Wall -std=c99 ./src/*.c -fcommon -lmingw32 -lSDL2main -lSDL2 -lm -o renderer

You will also need to change #include <SDL.h> to #include <SDL2/SDL.h> in main.c

To run after building the binary, make sure to place SLD2.dll in the same folder as the executable. You can get it from the SDL2 windows runtime libaries here: https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php. Make sure that the dll you use matches the platform you compiled it for.

Dependencies

The main dependency of this project is the Simple DirectMedia Layer 2 library.

Building and running

To build the project

make

To run the executable

make run

To fast compile and execute directly in memory (requires tcc)

make mem

Input keys

• 1: Show the wireframe and a small red dot for each triangle vertex
• 2: Show only the wireframe lines
• 3: Show filled triangles with a solid color
• 4: Show both filled triangles and wireframe lines
• 5: Show textured triangles
• 6: Show textured triangles with a wireframe
• c: Toggle back-face culling
• r: Toggle automatic rotation
• Up: Move camera up
• Down: Move camera down
• w: Move camera forward
• s: Move camera backward
• a: Yaw camera to the left
• d: Yaw camera to the right
• Left: Rotate left (y-axis)
• Right: Rotate right (y-axis)
• .: Increase rotation rate
• ,: Decrease rotation rate

Credits

• The incredibly fun 3D Graphics Programming from Scratch course by Gustavo Pezzi
• f22.obj, efa.obj, and f117.obj aircraft files were created by Artem Katrych.
• crab.obj file was created by Bohdan Lvov
• drone.obj file was created by Willy Decarpentrie.