JRTR Base Code

This project contains base code developed for an introduction to computer graphics course taught by Matthias Zwicker at the University of Maryland, College Park (CMSC427, Computer Graphics). This is educational code intended for students to learn about 3D graphics programming. The framework provides a skeleton for a real-time rendering engine.

Getting Started

For users on Linux / Windows

Import this project into Eclipse to work with it. First create an empty folder where your project will be located. Start Eclipse and select the created folder as workspace. Now you can import the Java code to the workspace by selecting the menu entry "File->Import->Git->Projects from Git->Next". Then choose "Clone URI". In the next dialogue "Source Git Repository", use https://github.com/mzwicker/JRTR-Base-Code-2021.git as URI. Leave the fields "User" and "Password" empty. In the dialogue "Local Destination", choose the created folder. This folder must be empty. After completion of the import, wait a few seconds for the initialization of the project creation. If the Maven build is not done correctly by default and you see errors in the code, update the projects by right-clicking on the project name, then "Maven->Update Project...". Afterwards, you should be able to run the project "simple" and see a rotating cube. If you use an older version of Eclipse, you may have to manually install the plugins for "Maven" and "Git" separately.

For users on macOS

Follow all of the instructions above. However, when importing this project into Eclipse, uncheck the master branch when you get to the "Branch Selection" dialogue. You'll only need to import the macos branch to get this project working.

After importing the project, you'll need to make two adjustments in order for the project to work correctly on your machine:

1. On macOS, the JVM argument -XstartOnFirstThread must be provided for the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and the Google Widget Toolkit (GWT) to work properly (e.g. creating windows won't work on macOS unless the application is run on thread 0). To do this, right click on either the jrtr or the simple project in the Package Explorer, select "Run As->Run Configurations", and on the "Arguments" tab, enter -XstartOnFirstThread into the box labelled "VM arguments."
2. Find the OpenGL version installed on your device at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823. By default, this branch is set to work with OpenGL version 4.1. If you're running on an older machine with an OpenGL version other than 4.1, please modify the value of GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MAJOR and GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MINOR in jrtr/src/main/java/jrtr/glrenderer/GLRenderPanel.java to match the version on your machine.

After that, you're all set! You should be able to run the base code on your machine.

Known issues

Maven dependencies

Sometimes downloading the dependencies using Maven doesn't work correctly, leading to errors in the code after following the steps in "Getting Started". In this case, try removing the files in ~.m2\repository\org\lwjgl (where ~ is the user's home directory) and going through the steps for updating the Maven build described under "Getting Started" again. This should solve the problem.

Unsupported GLSL version

If you encounter a compilation error similar to the one below, you can modify the shaders under jrtr/shaders and specify a version supported by your system.

0:1(10): error: GLSL 1.50 is not supported. Supported versions are: 1.10, 1.20, 1.30, 1.40, 1.00 ES, and 3.00 ES

Note: In this example, substituting #version 150 with #version 140 should resolve the compilation failure.

Working on Assignments

Public forks of this repository that contain solutions of any course assignments are prohibited. We recommend that you store your work in your own private repository on GitHub or a similar platform. To work with GitHub, see the documentation here.