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.
Below is an example of a python3 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()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 | shAdditional dependencies for Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install libvulkan-dev vulkan-tools xorg-dev libxkbcommon-x11-devFor MacOs, it should run out of the box.
For Python bindings, maturin is required:
$ python3 -m pip install maturinFor Web, we use wasm-pack:
$ curl https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/installer/init.sh -sSf | sh$ cd gloss
$ cargo build
$ cargo run --bin gloss_view_mesh$ cd gloss/bindings/gloss_py
$ ./scripts/build_local.sh
$ ./examples/empty.py$ cd gloss/examples/web
$ wasm-pack build --target webTo 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.
Various examples can be found in the ./examples folder. A short description of each one is given here:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Mesh View |  Visualizes a mesh with textures. Run with cargo r --bin gloss_view_mesh |
PyTorchintegration- Differentiable rendering
- Area lights
- Subsurface scattering
- Order-independent transparency
- Support for Gaussian Splatting
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_SCRIPTPartially, 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