Castor3D

Castor3D is a 3D engine written in C++ 20.

It works on Windows and GNU/Linux.

It relies on Vulkan as a rendering API.

The project itself is compilable on supported platforms using CMake and vcpkg (cf. build).

Features

• Clustered lighting to compute all light sources.
• Using a visibility buffer for opaque objects.
• Blended Weighted rendering for transparent objects.
• Normal mapping (using Mikktspace or explicit bitangents specification).
• Shadow Mapping (allowing to choose between Raw, PCF or Variance Shadow Maps).
• Parallax Occlusion mapping.
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (using Scalable Ambiant Obscurance).
• Reflection/Refraction Mapping.
• PBR rendering (Metallic and Specular workflows), and Phong/Blinn-Phong rendering.
• HDR rendering with various tone mapping operators and various colour grading operators.
• Screen Space Subsurface Scattering (without backlit transmittance yet).
• Volumetric Light Scattering for the directional light source, if it projects shadows.
• Cascaded Shadow Maps for the directional light source.
• Global Illumination, through Light Propagation Volumes (layered or non layered, with or without geometry injection), or through Voxel Cone Tracing.
• Frustum culling.
• Scene graph.
• Render graph.
• Modular architecture through plug-ins.
• Shaders are generated automatically from pipeline configuration.
• Shaders are writable directly from C++ code.
• Scenes are described using a text format easily comprehensible and extensible. (Scene File)
• Synchronous (user defined) or asynchronous (thread) rendering.
• Using Mesh and Task shaders, if available.

Implemented Plug-ins

Importers

• ASSIMP: Multiple format mesh importer, using assimp library.
• glTF: glTF 2.0 importer, more precise than assimp's provided one, using fastgltf library

PostEffects

• Bloom: HDR Bloom implementation.
• PbrBloom: PBR Bloom implementation.
• DrawEdges: Detects and renders edges, based on normal, depth, and or object ID.
• FilmGrain: To display some grain on the render.
• GrayScale: Converts render in gray scale.
• LightStreaks (using Kawase Light Streaks).
• FXAA Antialiasing.
• SMAA Antialiasing (1X and T2X so far).
• Linear Motion Blur.
• DepthOfField: Implementation of this depth of field

Generators

• DiamondSquareTerrain : to generate terrains inside Castor3D scenes, using diamond-quare algorithm.

Generic

• ToonMaterial: A toon material (to be combined with DrawEdges plugin).
• WaterMaterial: Water material, using normal maps.
• FFTOceanRendering: Ocean rendering using FFT generated surfaces.
• WavesRendering: Basic ocean rendering, specifying waves attributes.
• AtmosphereScattering : Sky and atmosphere rendering (using Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique).

ToneMappings

• None: A passthrough, used when rendering to an HDR screen.
• Linear: The default one.
• HaarmPieterDuiker.
• HejlBurgessDawson.
• Reinhard.
• Uncharted2.
• ACES.

Other applications

• CastorViewer: A scene viewer based on Castor3D.
• CastorMeshConverter: A converter from various mesh files to Castor3D mesh format.
• CastorMeshUpgrader: Upgrades from earlier versions of Castor3D mesh format to the latest one.
• ImgConverter: Allows you to convert any image file type to XPM or ICO.
• HeightMapToNormalMap: Allows you to convert an height map to a normal map.

Screenshots

See full changelog for more details.