Tutorials

ospTutorial

A minimal working example demonstrating how to use OSPRay can be found at apps/tutorials/ospTutorial.c¹.

An example of building ospTutorial.c with CMake can be found in apps/tutorials/ospTutorialFindospray/.

To build the tutorial on Linux, build it in a build directory with

gcc -std=c99 ../apps/ospTutorial/ospTutorial.c \
-I ../ospray/include -L . -lospray -Wl,-rpath,. -o ospTutorial

On Windows build it can be build manually in a “build_directory\$Configuration” directory with

cl ..\..\apps\ospTutorial\ospTutorial.c -I ..\..\ospray\include -I ..\.. ospray.lib

Running ospTutorial will create two images of two triangles, rendered with the Scientific Visualization renderer with full Ambient Occlusion. The first image firstFrame.ppm shows the result after one call to ospRenderFrame – jagged edges and noise in the shadow can be seen. Calling ospRenderFrame multiple times enables progressive refinement, resulting in antialiased edges and converged shadows, shown after ten frames in the second image accumulatedFrames.ppm.

ospExamples

Apart from tutorials, OSPRay comes with a C++ app called ospExamples which is an elaborate easy-to-use tutorial, with a single interface to try various OSPRay features. It is aimed at providing users with multiple simple scenes composed of basic geometry types, lights, volumes etc. to get started with OSPRay quickly.

ospExamples app runs a GLFWOSPRayWindow instance that manages instances of the camera, framebuffer, renderer and other OSPRay objects necessary to render an interactive scene. The scene is rendered on a GLFW window with an imgui GUI controls panel for the user to manipulate the scene at runtime.

The application is located in apps/ospExamples/ directory and can be built with CMake. It can be run from the build directory via:

./ospExamples <command-line-parameter>

The command line parameter is optional however.

ospExamples application with default boxes scene. — `ospExamples` application with default `boxes` scene.

Scenes

Different scenes can be selected from the scenes dropdown and each scene corresponds to an instance of a special detail::Builder struct. Example builders are located in apps/common/ospray_testing/builders/. These builders provide a usage guide for the OSPRay scene hierarchy and OSPRay API in the form of cpp wrappers. They instantiate and manage objects for the specific scene like cpp::Geometry, cpp::Volume, cpp::Light etc.

The detail::Builder base struct is mostly responsible for setting up OSPRay world and objects common in all scenes (for example lighting and ground plane), which can be conveniently overridden in the derived builders.

Given below are different scenes listed with their string identifiers:

boxes: A simple scene with box geometry type.
cornell_box: A scene depicting a classic cornell box with quad mesh geometry type for rendering two cubes and a quad light type.
curves: A simple scene with curve geometry type and options to change curveBasis. For details on different basis’ please check documentation of curves.
gravity_spheres_volume: A scene with structuredRegular type of volume.
gravity_spheres_isosurface: A scene depicting iso-surface rendering of gravity_spheres_volume using geometry type isosurface.
perlin_noise_volumes: An example scene with structuredRegular volume type depicting perlin noise.
random_spheres: A simple scene depicting sphere geometry type.
streamlines: A scene showcasing streamlines geometry derived from curve geometry type.
subdivision_cube: A scene with a cube of subdivision geometry type to showcase subdivision surfaces.
unstructured_volume: A simple scene with a volume of unstructured volume type.

Renderer

This app comes with four renderer options: scivis, pathtracer, ao and debug. The app provides some common rendering controls like pixelSamples and other more specific to the renderer type like aoSamples for the scivis and ao renderer or maxPathLength for the pathtracer.

The sun-sky lighting can be used in a sample scene by enabling the renderSunSky option of the pathtracer renderer. It allows the user to change turbidity and sunDirection.

Rendering an evening sky with the renderSunSky option. — Rendering an evening sky with the `renderSunSky` option.

A C++ version that uses the C++ convenience wrappers of OSPRay’s C99 API via include/ospray/ospray_cpp.h is available at apps/tutorials/ospTutorial.cpp.↩︎