The Open, Scalable, and Portable Ray Tracing Engine

Render massive scenes interactively

Disney’s Moana Island Scene: over 15 billion instanced primitives+volume at interactive rates

Photorealism

Physically-based shading and lighting

Feature rich, large-scale volume visualization

Richtmyer–meshkov volume shown with shadows and ambient occlusion

USD Hydra Integration

Gramophone rendered in Pixar’s usdview

Integrations in VTK, ParaView, VisIt, and more

DKRZ weather data rendered with shadows inside ParaView

Directly render unstructured and AMR volumes

AMR volume rendered without resampling inside ParaView

Interactive CPU Rendering

OSPRay features scalable CPU rendering capabilities geared toward Scientific Visualization applications. Advanced shading effects such as ambient occlusion, shadows, and transparency can be rendered interactively to enable new insights into huge data.

Global Illumination

OSPRay includes a path tracer capable of interactively rendering photorealistic global illumination with phyiscally-based materials.

Volume Rendering

OSPRay supports high-fidelity, interactive direct volume rendering with a number of state of the art visualization features.

MPI Distributed

Run on large scale distributed-memory systems with high-performance MPI backends to both decrease render time and increase total scene size.

Industry Adoption

OSPRay is directly integrated into ParaView 5.x. Implementations for VisIt, VMD, and other popular tools have also freely available.

Open Source

OSPRay is Open Sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

OSPRay Overview

Intel OSPRay is an open source, scalable, and portable ray tracing engine for high-performance, high-fidelity visualization on Intel Architecture CPUs. OSPRay is part of the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit and is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

The purpose of OSPRay is to provide an open, powerful, and easy-to-use rendering library that allows one to easily build applications that use ray tracing based rendering for interactive applications (including both surface- and volume-based visualizations). OSPRay is completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems.

OSPRay internally builds on top of Intel Embree and ISPC (Intel SPMD Program Compiler), and fully exploits modern instruction sets like Intel SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 to achieve high rendering performance, thus a CPU with support for at least SSE4.1 is required to run OSPRay.

OSPRay Support and Contact

OSPRay is under active development, and though we do our best to guarantee stable release versions a certain number of bugs, as-yet-missing features, inconsistencies, or any other issues are still possible. Should you find any such issues please report them immediately via OSPRay’s GitHub Issue Tracker (or, if you should happen to have a fix for it,you can also send us a pull request); for missing features please contact us via email at ospray@googlegroups.com.

To receive release announcements simply “Watch” the OSPRay repository on GitHub.

Changes in v2.4.0:

The pathtracer optionally allows for alpha blending even if the background is seen through refractive objects like glass, by enabling backgroundRefraction
OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v0.11.0 to bring the following improvements:
- Improved rendering performance of VDB volumes
- Added support for configurable iterator depth via the maxIteratorDepth parameters for unstructured and particle volumes, improved performance
- Added support for filter modes for structured volumes (regular and spherical)
Expose parameter horizonExtension of Sun-sky light, which extends the sky dome by stretching the horizon over the lower hemisphere
Optimize handling of geometry lights by the pathtracer
The optional denoiser image operation now respects frame cancellation, requiring Intel® Open Image Denoise with minimum version 1.2.3
Fixed normals of (transformed) isosurfaces
Robust calculation of normals of boxes geometry
Clipping geometry is now working correctly with map_maxDepth renderer parameter
Using materials in a renderer with a mismatched renderer_type no longer causes crashes while rendering

Changes in v2.3.0:

Re-add SciVis renderer features (the previous version is still available as ao renderer)
- Lights are regarded, and thus the OBJ material terms ks and ns have effect again
- Hard shadows are enabled via the shadows parameter
- The control of ambient occlusion changed:
  - The aoIntensity parameter is replaced by the combined intensity of ambient lights in the World
  - The effect range is controlled via aoDistance
Added support for data arrays with a stride between voxels in volumes
Application thread waiting for finished image via ospWait participates in rendering, increasing CPU utilization; via rkcommon v1.5.0
Added ospray_cpp compatibility headers for C++ wrappers to understand rkcommon and glm short vector types
- For rkcommon, include ospray/ospray_cpp/ext/rkcommon.h
- For glm, include ospray/ospray_cpp/ext/glm.h
- Note in debug builds some compilers will not optimize out type trait definitions. This will require users to manually instantiate the glm definitions in one translation unit within the application using #define OSPRAY_GLM_DEFINITIONS before including ext/glm.h: see ospTutorialGLM as an example
Changed parameters to volume texture: it now directly accepts the volume and the transferFunction
Fixed many memory leaks
Handle NaN during volume sampling, which led to bounding boxes being visible for some volumes and settings
Depth is now “accumulated” as well, using the minimum
Fix shading for multiple modes of the debug renderer
New minimum ISPC version is 1.14.1

For the complete history of changes have a look at the CHANGELOG.