ViennaRay is a flux calculation library for topography simulations, based in Intel®'s ray tracing kernel Embree. It is designed to provide efficient and high-performance ray tracing, while maintaining a simple and easy to use interface. ViennaRay was developed and optimized for use in conjunction with ViennaLS, which provides the necessary geometry representation. It is however possible to use this as a standalone library, with self-designed geometries.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ViennaRay is under heavy development and improved daily. If you do have suggestions or find bugs, please let us know!

Examples can be found on Github. Bug reports and suggestions should be filed on GitHub.

Releases are tagged on the main branch and available in the releases section.

• Windows (Visual Studio)

• Linux (g++ / clang)

• macOS (XCode)

• C++17 Compiler with OpenMP support

• Embree

Since Embree is optimized for CPU's using SSE, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 instructions, it requires at least a x86 CPU with support for SSE2 or an Apple M1 CPU.

Since this is a header only project, it does not require any installation. However, we recommend the following procedure in order to set up all dependencies correctly:

git clone github.com/ViennaTools/ViennaRay.git
cd ViennaRay
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/your/custom/install/
make buildDependencies # this will install Embree the first time it is called and might take a while
make install

This will install the necessary headers and CMake files to the specified path. If DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is not specified, it will be installed to the standard path for your system, usually /usr/local/ .

If you want to use your own install of Embree, just specify the directory in CMake:

git clone github.com/ViennaTools/ViennaRay.git
cd ViennaRay
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/your/custom/install/ -Dembree_DIR=/path/to/embree/install
make install

In order to use this library in your CMake project, add the following lines to the CMakeLists.txt of your project:

set(ViennaRay_DIR "/path/to/your/custom/install/")
find_package(ViennaRay REQUIRED)
add_executable(...)
target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC ${VIENNARAY_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} ${VIENNARAY_LIBRARIES})

The examples can be built using CMake:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DVIENNARAY_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON
make

ViennaRay uses CTest to run its tests. In order to check whether ViennaRay runs without issues on your system, you can run:

git clone github.com/ViennaTools/ViennaRay.git
cd ViennaRay
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DVIENNARAY_BUILD_TESTS=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG
make buildTests # build all tests
make test # run all tests

If you want to contribute to ViennaRay, make sure to follow the LLVM Coding guidelines. Before creating a pull request, make sure ALL files have been formatted by clang-format, which can be done using the format-project.sh script in the root directory.

Current contributors: Tobias Reiter, Xaver Klemenschits, Alexander Scharinger

Contact us via: [email protected]

ViennaRay was developed under the aegis of the 'Institute for Microelectronics' at the 'TU Wien'. http://www.iue.tuwien.ac.at/

See file LICENSE in the base directory.