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Welcome to Sol-R, the Speed Of Light Ray-tracer

Big news: Sol-R goes Quantum!

Sol-R becomes Quantum of Sol-R, thanks to the use of a Quantum Physics based random generation device. Unfortunately, the API to access the random number generator is not open-source but if you buy the ID Quantique QRng device, you will simply need to modify the _getFloats implementation of the RandomGenerator class, and I can tell you that it's pretty straight forward! You will also need to add set the SOLR_RANDOM_DEVICE_ENABLED cmake option to ON before configuring the project.

Sol-R_001

Note about the Blue Brain BioExplorer, a Sol-R sequel

If you like Sol-R, but you think it's now getting a bit old, you will love my new open-source, the Blue Brain BioExplorer. Check-it out and star the GitHub Repository to support the project.

Introduction

Sol-R is a CUDA/OpenCL-based realtime ray-tracer compatible with Oculus Rift DK1, Kinect, Razor Hydra and Leap Motion devices. Sol-R was used by the Interactive Molecular Visualizer project (http://www.molecular-visualization.com)

A number of videos can be found on my Youtube channel.

Sol-R was written as a hobby project in order to understand and learn more about CUDA and OpenCL. Most of the code was written at night and during week-ends, meaning that it's probably not the best quality ever ;-)

The idea was to produce a Ray-Tracer that has its own "personality". Most of the code does not rely on any literature about ray-tracing, but more on a naive approach of what rays could be used for. A simple engine that could produce cool images interactively.

Take it for what it is! Sol-R is a lot of fun to play with if you like coding computer generated images.

May the fun continue with your contributions! :)

usage: solrViewer

Sol-R_002

Prerequeries

Mandatory

Optional

Build from source

mkdir Build
cd Build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<installation-folder>
make install

Note that the installation process with deploy extra files that are needed by the Sol-R viewer. Typically, textures, environment maps and OpenCL kernels. Therefore, it is required to run the solrViewer application from the installation folder.

Run

<installation-folder>/bin/solrViewer

Selecting CUDA or OpenCL

By default, the OpenCL engine is selected but this can be changed by modifying the SOLR_ENGINE option, using either ccmake or the following cmake option:

cmake .. -DSOLR_ENGINE:STRING=CUDA

Optional dependencies can be activated using the following cmake options:

cmake .. -DSOLR_KINECT_ENABLED=ON -DSOLR_OCULUS_ENABLED=ON -DSOLR_SIXENSE_ENABLED -DSOLR_LEAPMOTION_ENABLED=ON

Supported platforms

Sol-R has currently been tested on: