RaZ

Modern & multiplatform 3D game engine

RaZ is a personal project I started in mid-2017, in my last years of study. I was eager to learn about computer graphics, and was really interested in image processing & offline rendering at the time.

RaZ has originally started as a 3D rendering engine toy project, intended solely for learning purposes. However, the more I was working on it, the more I wanted to keep doing so. Over time, it has evolved to be now more of a (basic) game engine rather than a simple rendering one.

As every proper engine has an editor, RaZ also has its own, RaZor. It does yet require a lot of work, as not much is possible at the moment, but several features are available and can be tinkered with.

If you’re interested, feel free to explore (and star ⭐) the project on GitHub. If you think of improvements or features you’d want to see in RaZ, don’t hesitate to file an issue or submit a pull request!

Some tutorials & explanations are available on the GitHub’s wiki. If you already know of RaZ and seek the documentation, you’re in luck: it’s right here!

A Discord server is also available, feel free to drop by if you have any question or just want to say hi:

Some examples

Below are shown several scenes and projects made with RaZ. Note that some have corresponding online demos; don’t hesitate to try them out!

Crytek Sponza (Blinn-Phong)	Hylian shield (PBR/Cook-Torrance) (demo)

Atmos - Atmospheric simulation (demo)	Midgard - Terrain generation (demo)

Features

RaZ is entirely written in C++, scriptable in Lua, and architectured as an ECS (Entity-Component-System). It is compatible with Windows, Linux & macOS, and can also be used for web-based applications using Emscripten.

Animation

• Skeleton data structure
• Animation support (in progress)

Audio

• Using OpenAL Soft
• Playing/pausing/stopping/repeating sounds
• Positional audio sources & listener
• Sound effects (reverberation, chorus, distortion, echo, …)
• Audio input (microphone) mono/stereo support

Data

• Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure
• Directed graph structure
• Mesh signed distance field
• Dynamic bitset
• File formats:
  • Meshes:
    • glTF/GLB import (using fastgltf)
    • OBJ import/export
    • FBX import (using the FBX SDK)
    • OFF import
  • Images:
    • PNG, JPEG, BMP, TGA, HDR, GIF, PPM/PGM, PSD, PIC import (using stb_image)
    • PNG, JPEG, BMP, TGA, HDR export (using stb_image_write)
    • TGA import
  • Audio: WAV import/export
  • Animation: BVH import (in progress)

Math

• Vectors, matrices & quaternions
• Angles (degrees/radians)
• Transformations (translation, rotation, scale)
• Noise (Perlin, Worley)

Physics

• Shapes (line, plane, sphere, triangle, quad, AABB, OBB)
• Shape/shape collision checks (in progress)
• Ray/shape intersection checks (in progress)
• Rigid body simulation (in progress)

Rendering

• OpenGL (4.6-3.3)
• Vulkan (in progress)
• PBR (Cook-Torrance) & legacy (Blinn-Phong) material models
• Deferred rendering, using a custom render graph
• Post effects: bloom, tone mapping, SSR, SSAO, … (in progress)
• Tessellation & compute shaders support
• Camera (perspective/orthographic)
• Light sources (point & directional)
• Windowing (window, keyboard/mouse inputs with custom callbacks), using GLFW
• Overlay, using ImGui & ImPlot
• Cubemap
• Normal mapping

Scripting

• Lua scripting, using Sol2

Misc

• Custom ECS (Entity Component System) implementation
• Uniformized platform-dependent path strings
• Logging utilities
• Multithreading utilities, thread pool implementation & parallelization functions
• Plugin utilities, to load dynamic libraries
• Compiler, enum, string, file, floating-point & type utilities
• Tracy profiler integration