Overview

Psychopath is a path tracer, aimed at rendering animations and VFX for film. It is currently still in an early prototyping stage of development.

This project is mostly for fun, but I do hope it eventually becomes useful. That "for-fun" disclaimer aside, the long-term goals of Psychopath are to support efficient global illumination rendering of scenes that are significantly larger than available RAM and/or that contain procedural elements that need to be generated on-the-fly during rendering.

The approach that Psychopath takes to enable this is to try to access the scene data in as coherent a fashion as possible via breadth-first ray tracing, allowing the cost of HDD access, expensive procedurals, etc. to be amortized over large batches of rays.

Psychopath used to be written in C++ but is now written in Rust. The curious can take a look at the old C++ code-base here.

I occasionally blog about Psychopath's development at psychopath.io.

Building

Building Psychopath is mostly straightforward 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 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.

If you have any difficulties, please feel free to file an issue and I'll try to help out as I have time!

Current Features

• Geometry:
  • Triangle meshes (both flat and smooth shading)
• Lights:
  • Spherical light sources
  • Rectangular light sources
  • Distant disc light sources (a.k.a. sun lights)
• Motion blur:
  • Camera motion blur
  • Deformation motion blur
  • Transform motion blur
• Focal blur / DoF
• Spectral rendering (via monte carlo sampling)
• Full hierarchical instancing
• Light Tree sampling for efficient handling of large numbers of lights. (See this thread for an overview of the technique.)
• Shading:
  • A simple material system that supports single-color Lambert and GTR BRDFs assigned per-instance.

PsychoBlend

Included in the repository is an addon 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.

If you have any trouble getting the addon working, please feel free to file an issue and I'll try to troubleshoot/fix it as I have time!

Features Supported

• Meshes (rendered as flat-shaded triangle 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. Eventually when things become less playful/experimental I will likely want to start collaborating, but that's quite a ways off.

However, I do want people to be able to play with Psychopath, so if you have trouble getting it to build/run please file an issue! And if you want to fork it and play around with the code yourself (or start an entirely new project based on it!) feel free. That's why I put it under the MIT license.

Also, 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

The original code in Psychopath is distributed under the MIT license.

PsychoBlend is distributed under the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version.

Some code in this repository was adapted to Rust from other sources. With one exception, all of the adapted code is from sources that are licensed under the MIT license or a BSD license variant. Adapted code is marked by comments citing their source.

The one exception is the code in sub_crates/spectra_xyz/src/generate_spectra_rust.py, which is adapted from the supplemental material of the paper "Physically Meaningful Rendering using Tristimulus Colours" by Meng et al. It has no explicit license, but I contacted one of the authors and confirmed that it is intended to be used freely. Take that for what you will!