✨ Gloss

A light-weight Physically-based Renderer, made with Rust and wgpu

Gloss is a light-weight Physically-based Renderer written in Rust and wgpu. The main functionality includes loading meshes with high-resolution textures, rendering them with advanced graphics features, and allowing a general framework to explore new rendering techniques. Gloss also compiles for Python and Web, allowing for rendering in multiple different environments.

Documentation

• Gloss Rust API Documentation: Automatically generated docs for Gloss's Rust API
• Gloss Rust Examples: Gloss's runnable examples in Rust, covering basic usage.
• Gloss Python Examples: Gloss's runnable examples for the Python bindings. Covers a wide range of features of the Python bindings.

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with gloss is to install the Python bindings.

$ pip install gloss-rs

Below is a basic example of a python script which shows a single mesh using the default viewing parameters. More examples for the python bindings can be found in the bindings/gloss_py/examples folder.

import gloss

viewer = gloss.Viewer()

mesh = viewer.get_or_create_entity("mesh")
mesh.insert_builder(gloss.geom.build_from_file("my/mesh.obj")) 

viewer.run()

Installation and Dependencies

The main dependency is installing Rust, as the rest of dependencies are handled by cargo. To install Rust, simply run the following in your terminal:

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Some additional dependencies for Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install libvulkan-dev vulkan-tools xorg-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev

For MacOs, it should run out of the box.

For running the Rust examples

$ cd gloss
$ cargo run --bin gloss_view_mesh

For running the Python examples

$ cd gloss/bindings/gloss_py
$ pip install gloss-rs
$ ./examples/empty.py

Build and run the Web Example

For Web, we use wasm-pack:

$ curl https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/installer/init.sh -sSf | sh

To build the web example, run:

$ cd gloss/examples/web
$ wasm-pack build --target web

To run the web example, we can create a dummy web server by opening another terminal and running:

$ cd gloss/examples/web
$ python -m http.server 

Finally, navigate to http://0.0.0.0:8000/gloss_webpage/ in your browser of choice.

Planned features

• PyTorch integration
• Differentiable rendering
• Area lights
• Subsurface scattering
• Order-independent transparency
• Support for Gaussian Splatting

Troubleshoot

If you have a laptop with both Intel graphics and NVIDIA, go to nvidia-settings and set the GPU to performance mode. Letting it run "on-demand" can cause issues with an external monitor: <https://askubuntu.com/a/1447935>

If there are any exceptions that mention "Maybe there's a driver issue on your machine?", please check that you have GPU vulkan drivers installed (libvulkan-dev vulkan-tools) and running vulkaninfo | grep GPU shows a real GPU and not a software solution like llvmpipe.

If there are still issues with "Maybe there's a driver issue on your machine", you can switch to GL backend with:

$ sudo apt-get install mesa-utils libegl-dev
$ sudo usermod -a -G render $USER
$ sudo usermod -a -G video $USER
RELOG 
$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 WGPU_BACKEND=gl MY_SCRIPT

Partially, this solution comes from "Solution 1" from <https://stackoverflow.com/a/72427700>, where it seems that conda can cause issues.

Another solution might be: conda install -c conda-forge libstdcxx-ng

Acknowledgements and Credits

• Rerun
• Bevy
• HECS
• wasm-log
• Stall 2 mesh
• Bust of Róża Loewenfeld