Overview

Psychopath is a path tracing 3d renderer. You can read about its development at 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, 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.

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 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

Contributing

I'm not looking for contributions right now, and I'm likely to reject pull requests. This is currently a solo project and I like it that way.

However, if you're looking for projects related to Psychopath to contribute to, OpenEXR-rs is definitely a collaborative project that I would love more help with! And I fully expect more such projects to come out of Psychopath in the future.

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.