psychopath/README.md
2022-03-31 10:27:47 -07:00

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# Overview
Psychopath is a path tracing 3d renderer. You can read about its development
at [psychopath.io](http://psychopath.io).
This project is mostly just for me to have fun, learn, and play with ideas in
3d rendering. I do have vague hopes that it will eventually be useful for real
things, but that's not a hard goal.
Unlike many for-fun 3d rendering projects, Psychopath is being designed with
production rendering in mind. I think that architecting a renderer to
efficiently handle very large data sets, complex shading, motion blur, color
management, etc. presents a much richer and more challenging problem space to
explore than just writing a basic path tracer.
## Building
Psychopath is written in [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org), and is pretty
straightforward to build except for its OpenEXR dependency.
If you have OpenEXR 2.2 installed on your system such that pkg-config can find
it, then as long as you have Rust (including Cargo) and a C++ compiler
installed, you should be able to build Psychopath with this command at the
repository root:
```
cargo build --release
```
However, if you are on an OS that doesn't have pkg-config (e.g. OSX, Windows),
or you prefer to do a custom build of OpenEXR, then you will need to download
and build OpenEXR yourself and specify the necessary environment variables as
documented in the [OpenEXR-rs readme](https://github.com/cessen/openexr-rs/blob/master/README.md).
Once those environment variables are set, then you should be able to build using
the same simple cargo command above.
# PsychoBlend
Included in the repository is an add-on for [Blender](http://www.blender.org)
called "PsychoBlend" that lets you use Psychopath for rendering in Blender.
However, most Blender features are not yet supported because Psychopath itself
doesn't support them yet.
## Features Supported
- Polygon meshes.
- Point, area, and sun lamps (exported as sphere, rectangle, and distant disc lights, respectively)
- Simple materials assigned per-object.
- Focal blur / DoF
- Camera, transform, and deformation motion blur
- Exports dupligroups with full hierarchical instancing
- Limited auto-detection of instanced meshes
# License
See LICENSE.md for details. But the gist is:
* The overall project is licensed under GPLv3.
* PsychoBlend is licensed under GPLv2, for compatibility with Blender.
* Most crates under the `sub_crates` directory are dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0 (but with some exceptions--see each crate for its respective licenses).
The intent of this scheme is to keep Psychopath itself copyleft, while allowing smaller reusable components to be licensed more liberally.
# Contributing
This is a personal, experimental, for-fun project, and I am specifically
not looking for contributions of any kind. All PRs will be rejected
without review.
However, feel free to fork this into an entirely new project, or examine
the code for ideas for a project of your own.