#+TITLE: Sixth 3D - 3D engine
-----
- This is a subproject of [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth/][Sixth]]
- Clone GIT repository using command:
: git clone http://www2.svjatoslav.eu/git/sixth-3d.git
- [[http://www2.svjatoslav.eu/gitweb/?p=sixth-3d.git;a=snapshot;h=HEAD;sf=tgz][Download latest snapshot in TAR GZ format]]
+ This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the [[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html][GNU Lesser General Public License]] as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
- Program author:
- Svjatoslav Agejenko
- Homepage: http://svjatoslav.eu
- Email: mailto://svjatoslav@svjatoslav.eu
- [[http://www.svjatoslav.eu/projects/][Other software projects hosted at svjatoslav.eu]]
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* Project description
+ See: [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth-3d-demos/][demos of current 3D engine capabilities]]
[[id:d03013e5-931b-40ca-bc4b-e4b3f23b9a4e][In software]], [[id:a11f7150-1b25-4ca4-a3c3-8c8bd1352bd4][pure Java]] realtime 3D rendering engine. With the final
goal of becoming a platform for buildng 3D user interfaces and
interactive data visualization for [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth/][project Sixth]].
Sixth 3D can be also used as standalone [[id:08f71987-90af-40dc-bb65-bac87db9e652][3D engine in your project]].
** Justification for software rendering
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: d03013e5-931b-40ca-bc4b-e4b3f23b9a4e
:END:
3D rendering is done in software, 100% pure Java on CPU. At least for
now. Modern CPU cores count keeps growing and therefore rendering by
CPU is not as expensive as it used to be for the old single core
systems.
CPU rendering performance is already good enough to implement usable
3D UI at sufficient detail level, resolution and frame rate.
Also CPU rendering allows to freely test different rendering and
optimization algorithms and retains complete control of every rendered
pixel.
** Justification for Java
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: a11f7150-1b25-4ca4-a3c3-8c8bd1352bd4
:END:
- It is easy to refactor and experiment with.
- Easy portability and installation. No need to deal with platform
specific dependencies.
- It scales well to handle great complexity.
- Allows to implement clever performance optimizations (instead of
going for GPU offered brute-force rendering approach).
- No limitations imposed by:
- requirement for decent GPU
- GPU missing features
- GPU missing/incomplete/buggy drivers
- OpenGL specification
- It is fast enough thanks to:
- Java virtual machine just-in-time compiler.
- Growing CPU cores count.
- As a result it is easy to run on various hardware platforms and
operating systems.
* TODO API documentation
Documentation currently missing for the lack of time.
So far best resource is to download and explore source code for:
+ 3D engine ([[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth-3d/graphs/][generated code graphs]] (generated using [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/javainspect/][JavaInspect]]))
+ For API usage examples, see [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth-3d-demos/][demos]]
* Instructions to embed Sixth-3D in your project
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 08f71987-90af-40dc-bb65-bac87db9e652
:END:
Maven *pom.xml* file snippet:
#+BEGIN_SRC xml
...
eu.svjatoslavsixth-3d1.1
...
...
svjatoslav.euSvjatoslav repositoryhttp://www2.svjatoslav.eu/maven/
...
#+END_SRC
For API usage examples, see [[http://www3.svjatoslav.eu/projects/sixth-3d-demos/][demos]].
* TODO features to add
+ Partial region/frame repaint: when only one small object changed on
the scene, it would be faster to re-render that specific area.
+ Once partial rendering works, in would be easy to add multi-core
rendering support. So that each core renders it's own region of the
screen.
+ Antialiazing. Would improve text readability. If antialiazing is too
expensive for every frame, it could be used only for last frame
before animations become still and waiting for user input starts.
+ Render only visible polygons.
+ This would significantly reduce RAM <-> CPU traffic.
+ General algorithm description:
+ For each horizontal scanline:
+ sort polygon edges from left to right
+ while iterating and drawing pixels over screen X axis (left to
right) track next appearing/disappearing polygons.
+ For each polygon edge update Z sorted active polygons list.
+ Only draw pixel from the top-most polygon.
+ Only if polygon area is transparent/half-transparent add
colors from the polygons below.
+ As a bonus, this would allow to track which polygons are really
visible in the final scene for each frame.
+ Such information allows further optimizations:
+ Dynamic geometry simplification:
+ Dynamically detect and replace invisible objects from the
scene with simplified bounding box.
+ Dynamically replace boudnig box with actual object once it
becomes visible.
+ Dynamically unload unused textures from RAM.