sfera

Project Information

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Code license
GNU GPL v3
Labels
OpenCL, OpenGL, RayTracing, GPU, Game, GPGPU

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Sfera is a game, mostly written using OpenCL and OpenGL, with real-time path tracing (i.e. ray tracing) rendering. It includes a Bullet Physics based engine.

Video

A Sfera demo video is available here.

News

Check the news wiki page for any Sfera related news.

Features

Sfera supports:

Multiple render engines: mono-thread, multi-thread, mono-GPU, multi-GPUs;
Multiple materials (all can emit light): matte, mirror, glass, metal, alloy;
Texture mapping;
Bump mapping;
Depth of field;
A text SDL (Scene Description Language) for levels;
Multi-platforms (i.e. Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc.);
A single awesome primitive supported: sphere;

Authors

David "Dade" Bucciarelli <davibu.at.interfree.it>

Sfera is heavly based on SmallLuxGPU v2.0 and many other classes from LuxRender project.

Credits

A special thanks goes to:

http://www.bulletphysics.org for the physic engine;
http://freeimage.sourceforge.net for open source image library;
http://www.libsdl.org for cross-platform multimedia library;
http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html for HDR maps;
http://freebitmaps.blogspot.com for planet texture maps;

This software is released under GPL v3 License (see COPYING.txt file).

History of ray tracing and World of Spheres

I trace the root of world of spheres up to the wonderful Kevin Beason's SmallPT. Thierry Berger-Perrin ported SmallPT to CUDA with Tokaspt. I wrote SmallPT GPU and SmallPT GPU2: an OpenCL version of SmallPT, as soon as the ATI OpenCL SDK was released. Ray Tracey's Tokap has shown that real-time ray tracing is a viable option for games and world of spheres. I hope Sfera will be another enjoyable chapter in the path of world of spheres !