Will Usher

One of the most critical challenges for high-performance computing (HPC) scientific visualization is execution on massively threaded processors.

In this post we’ll take a look at adding distributed rendering to tray_rust which will let us take advantage of multiple machines when rendering an image, like a compute cluster.

In this post we’ll look at adding a pretty awesome new feature to tray_rust, something I’ve never implemented before: animation!

We present a novel approach to rendering large particle data sets from molecular dynamics, astrophysics and other sources.

It’s been a little while since my last post on tray_rust as I’ve been a busy with classes, but I’ve had a bit of free time to implement some extremely cool features.

As mentioned in my previous post I spent the past month-ish working on improving both the rendering capabilities and performance of tray_rust.

I’ve decided to port over my physically based ray tracer tray to Rust to finally try out the language with a decent sized project.

In this quick postscript we’ll look into a simple way to clean up our various SDL resources with variadic templates and template specialization.

In this short postscript we’ll learn how to make use of SDL_GetBasePath to properly resolve the path to our resource directory where we’ll be storing all the assets needed for each lesson.

CMake is really useful for building the lessons since it lets us generate make files or project files for just about any platform and IDE.

In this lesson we’ll see how to perform basic True Type font rendering with the SDL_ttf extension library.

It’s common in sprite based games to use a larger image file containing many smaller images, such as the tiles for a tileset, instead of having a separate image file for each tile.

In this lesson we’ll learn the basics of reading user input with SDL, in this simple example we’ll interpret any input as the user wanting to quit our application.

Up until now we’ve only been using BMP images as they’re the only type supported by the base SDL library, but being restricted to using BMP images isn’t that great.

In this lesson we’ll begin organizing our texture loading and rendering code from the previous lesson by moving them out of main and placing them into some useful functions.

In this lesson we’ll learn how to open a window, create a rendering context and draw an image we’ve loaded to the screen.

Now that we’ve got the libraries installed we’ll want to create a new project to include and link against SDL.

The first step is to get the SDL2 development libraries setup on your system, you can download them from the SDL2 downloads page.

To build the projects with mingw we’ll be using a lightweight makefile that will set the include and library paths along with linking our dependencies for us.

To build the projects on OS X we’ll be using a simple makefile that will include the framework for us.

To build the projects on Linux we’ll be using a simple makefile that will setup the include and library dependencies for us.