This code is designed for building previews of 3D models. So we aim at rendering many formats of 3D models robustly with acceptable quality.

1. A light-weight offscreen renderer in C++.
2. Fast to run.
3. Run in command line.
4. Support over 40+ common 3D formats such as OBJ, OFF and COLLADA.
5. Support materials and textures.

First, install dependencies by apt-get:

sudo apt-get install libglew-dev libdevil-dev libassimp-dev freeglut3-dev libpng3 libsysfs-dev libudev-dev

Second, install Mesa3D (>=11.0.7):

wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/11.0.7/mesa-11.0.7.tar.gz
tar xvf mesa-11.0.7.tar.gz
cd mesa-11.0.7
./configure --enable-osmesa --disable-driglx-direct
make -j20
sudo make install

By default, this will install OSMesa to /usr/local.

Note You may have other versions of Mesa3D installed before. Then you need to uninstall/remove/disable old versions, or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Old versions of OSMesa might be found in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.

It is suggested that you set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH as follows:

set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Third, build the renderer by running

git clone git@github.com:ShapeNet/LightweightRenderer.git
cd LightweightRenderer
make

This will create an executable named render

Lastly, test your build by running

./render airplane.obj airplane.png

This should generate an image named airplane.png as below:

run render and help message appears.

Normal smoothing is not enabled. This is to avoid bad rendering when surface normals are incorrect.