regen -- Real-time Graphics Engine -- is a portable OpenGL library written in C++. The purpose of this library is to help creating real-time rendering software. Some example renderings created by regen are shown in the GIFs above. For each of them you can find an example configuration for regen here.

A graphics card supporting the OpenGL 3.3 API is required for regen. Some features from the 4.0 API are also supported but optional for backwards compatibility. The engine was tested with proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers and should work with Unix based operating systems and Windows.

Development

The development is at the moment mostly in maintanance mode. This includes:

• Making sure it runs with latest stable Ubuntu
• Merging pull requests

Additional features are currently only be worked on occasionally to create specific scenes, or to explore specific algorithmic challanges in computer graphics.

Downloading

Clone the code from github. The master branch contains the most up to date source code. For each release you will find a custom branch.

Compiling

regen builds with CMake. Run cmake . in the root directory to generate files needed for compiling. On Unix systems CMake will generate Makefile's with usual targets. Running make invokes the compiler and linker and if make was successfull a static library libregen.a was created in the root directory. On Windows CMake generates Visual Studio files, just open them and compile from the IDE.

regen defines following build targets:

Target	Description
all	Compile and link the engine.
install	Install compiled library.
doc	Generate doxygen documentation.
package	Generate a regen package (archive file on Linux).

CMake supports some default parameters for compiler and build path setup, consider the CMake documentations for a complete socumentation of these arguments. Some important argument are listed below.

CMake argument	Description
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX	Path were the engine should get installed when the install target is used.
CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH	Path were you installed the dependency library headers.
CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH	Path were you installed the dependency libraries.
-G $GENERATOR_NAME	Specifies custom build file generator. You might need to set this to "Visual Studio 11 Win64" when you intend to build the library for Win 64 Bit.

Following you can find a list of cmake arguments with special handling in the regen build files:

CMake argument	Default	Description
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE	Release	One of Release or Debug. With Debug mode the engine is compiled with additional debugging symbols.
-DBUILD_TESTS	0	If set to 1 the test applications will be compiled by all target
-DBUILD_VIDEO_PLAYER	0	If set to 1 the video player application will be compiled by all target

On Windows you might have to set environment variables for the dependency libraries. Following you can find a list of those variables:

Environment variable	Description
GLEW_DIR	Base path for GLEW library.
Boost_DIR	Base path for Boost library.
ASSIMP_DIR	Base path for Assimp library.
FREETYPE_DIR	Base path for Freetype library.
DEVIL_DIR	Base path for DevIL library.
FFMPEG_DIR	Base path for FFmpeg library.
OPENAL_DIR	Base path for OpenAL library.
ALUT_DIR	Base path for ALut library.
BULLET_DIR	Base path for Bullet library.

Feature List

Here you find a brief list of supported features in this library.

• Portability: Tested with Windows8, Ubuntu11.10 and ArchLinux
• Augmented GLSL:
  • input modification (constant, uniform, attribute, instanced attribute)
  • support for 'include' and 'for' directive
• Render State: encapsulates GL states and avoids redundant state switches.
• Audio/Video: Streaming from file resources, 3D Sound
• Image loading: Support for common image formats (png, jpg, hdr, ...)
• Text rendering: Loading of Freetype fonts, rendering of texture mapped text
• Model loading: Support for common model formats (3ds, ply, obj, ...), support for bone animations
• Shading: Deferred and Direct shading is supported
• Picking: Supports to distinguish between objects and instances
• Scene post processing: FXAA, Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Fog, Tonemap ...
• Sky Rendering: Dynamic sky with realistic scattering
• Particles: Simple implementations of smoke,rain,snow particles
• Volume Rendering: Simple raycasting volume renderer
• Scene Graph: Loading scenes from XML resources

Dependency List

Following you can find a list of libraries that must be installed in order to compile regen.

• OpenGL >=3.3
• OpenAL Soft >=1.1 and ALUT
  • You might have to compile ALUT manually on Win. I had troubles linking against the binary distribution using VisualStudio, probably incompatible compilers.
• Assimp >= 2.0
  • You have to copy the dll manually to binary dir on Win (.dll is not named like .lib)
• DevIL >= 1.4.0
• FreeType >= 2.4.0
  • You might have to compile FreeType manually on Win. I had troubles linking against the binary distribution using VisualStudio, probably incompatible compilers.
• Boost
  • components: thread system date_time filesystem regex
  • compile options: --build-type=complete
• FFmpeg
  • download Dev and Shared package from here on Win. You have to copy the dll manually to binary dir (.dll is not named like .lib).
• Bullet

In order to compile the test applications you will also need to install the following list of libraries:

• Qt >=5.0 (QtCore, QtGui, QtOpenGL)
  • Note: use Qt5 installer for Win

Documentation

The documentation is hosted using the gh-pages branch

Videos of regen in action

Contact

If you find any bugs or if you have any feature requests please report them to the github tracker.

You also can contact me directly via mail or Jabber if you like (address: daniel(at)orgizm.net).