A 3D graphics pipeline entirely on CPU. This implements a complete graphical pipeline without the assistance of a GPU. It supports reading models from Wavefront .obj files, too.

This project is done being developed-- it's mostly just for fun, anyway. I've written basic instructions for compiling this project below, but I also published binaries for Linux and macOS in the final release.

Below will work for Linux and macOS. If you're on Windows, you're on your own. WSL2 may be of assistance. You'll need SDL2, your favorite C compiler (GCC or Clang recommended), and make.

1. Install SDL2. This is required for creating a display window. On Linux, your distro of choice should ship a version in the system package manager, probably named sdl, or sdl2, or something similar. On macOS, you can install from Homebrew with brew install sdl2. Note that, now that SDL3 is released, many packagers have renamed their SDL2 packages to something like sdl2-compat.

2. Ensure make is installed. Open up a terminal and run make to see if it is. It should be installed by default on any Linux distro; macOS might prompt you to install developer tools.

3. Clone this repo onto your computer.

4. CD into the root project directory. Check the Makefile line 14 for RUNTIME ?= ... and make sure it is set to your correct platform-- either linux or macos. There is also support in the Makefile for windows, but I can't be sure it will work.

5. Run make to compile, then make publish to create a neatly packaged binary.

6. CD into publish and run ./3drender bj>, where bj> is a Wavefront object file. You can use ../cube.obj or ../3d.obj to use one of the models I included.

You should hopefully find compiled binaries of the latest version of the codebase on the latest GitHub release. Again, only for Linux and macOS; Windows users look above, sorry. Simply download the binary for your OS and enjoy. Run it from a terminal with ./3drender bj> where bj> is a Wavefront object file. You can export models from Blender as Wavefront objects, or you can download one of the two that I included in this repository: cube.obj and 3d.obj.