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Filament

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Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, and WebGL. It is designed to be as small as possible and as efficient as possible on Android.

Download

Download Filament releases to access stable builds. Filament release archives contains host-side tools that are required to generate assets.

Make sure you always use tools from the same release as the runtime library. This is particularly important for matc (material compiler).

If you'd rather build Filament yourself, please refer to our build manual.

Android

Android projects can simply declare Filament libraries as Maven dependencies:

repositories {
    // ...
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.google.android.filament:filament-android:1.56.4'
}

Here are all the libraries available in the group com.google.android.filament:

ArtifactDescription
filament-androidThe Filament rendering engine itself.
filament-android-debugDebug version of filament-android.
gltfio-androidA glTF 2.0 loader for Filament, depends on filament-android.
filament-utils-androidKTX loading, Kotlin math, and camera utilities, depends on gltfio-android.
filamat-androidA runtime material builder/compiler. This library is large but contains a full shader compiler/validator/optimizer and supports both OpenGL and Vulkan.
filamat-android-liteA much smaller alternative to filamat-android that can only generate OpenGL shaders. It does not provide validation or optimizations.

iOS

iOS projects can use CocoaPods to install the latest release:

pod 'Filament', '~> 1.56.4'

Documentation

Examples

Night scene Night scene Materials Materials Helmet Screen-space refraction

Features

APIs

Backends

Rendering

Post processing

glTF 2.0

Rendering with Filament

Native Linux, macOS and Windows

You must create an Engine, a Renderer and a SwapChain. The SwapChain is created from a native window pointer (an NSView on macOS or a HWND on Windows for instance):

Engine* engine = Engine::create();
SwapChain* swapChain = engine->createSwapChain(nativeWindow);
Renderer* renderer = engine->createRenderer();

To render a frame you must then create a View, a Scene and a Camera:

Camera* camera = engine->createCamera(EntityManager::get().create());
View* view = engine->createView();
Scene* scene = engine->createScene();

view->setCamera(camera);
view->setScene(scene);

Renderables are added to the scene:

Entity renderable = EntityManager::get().create();
// build a quad
RenderableManager::Builder(1)
        .boundingBox({{ -1, -1, -1 }, { 1, 1, 1 }})
        .material(0, materialInstance)
        .geometry(0, RenderableManager::PrimitiveType::TRIANGLES, vertexBuffer, indexBuffer, 0, 6)
        .culling(false)
        .build(*engine, renderable);
scene->addEntity(renderable);

The material instance is obtained from a material, itself loaded from a binary blob generated by matc:

Material* material = Material::Builder()
        .package((void*) BAKED_MATERIAL_PACKAGE, sizeof(BAKED_MATERIAL_PACKAGE))
        .build(*engine);
MaterialInstance* materialInstance = material->createInstance();

To learn more about materials and matc, please refer to the materials documentation.

To render, simply pass the View to the Renderer:

// beginFrame() returns false if we need to skip a frame
if (renderer->beginFrame(swapChain)) {
    // for each View
    renderer->render(view);
    renderer->endFrame();
}

For complete examples of Linux, macOS and Windows Filament applications, look at the source files in the samples/ directory. These samples are all based on libs/filamentapp/ which contains the code that creates a native window with SDL2 and initializes the Filament engine, renderer and views.

For more information on how to prepare environment maps for image-based lighting please refer to BUILDING.md.

Android

See android/samples for examples of how to use Filament on Android.

You must always first initialize Filament by calling Filament.init().

Rendering with Filament on Android is similar to rendering from native code (the APIs are largely the same across languages). You can render into a Surface by passing a Surface to the createSwapChain method. This allows you to render to a SurfaceTexture, a TextureView or a SurfaceView. To make things easier we provide an Android specific API called UiHelper in the package com.google.android.filament.android. All you need to do is set a render callback on the helper and attach your SurfaceView or TextureView to it. You are still responsible for creating the swap chain in the onNativeWindowChanged() callback.

iOS

Filament is supported on iOS 11.0 and above. See ios/samples for examples of using Filament on iOS.

Filament on iOS is largely the same as native rendering with C++. A CAEAGLLayer or CAMetalLayer is passed to the createSwapChain method. Filament for iOS supports both Metal (preferred) and OpenGL ES.

Assets

To get started you can use the textures and environment maps found respectively in third_party/textures and third_party/environments. These assets are under CC0 license. Please refer to their respective URL.txt files to know more about the original authors.

Environments must be pre-processed using cmgen or using the libiblprefilter library.

How to make contributions

Please read and follow the steps in CONTRIBUTING.md. Make sure you are familiar with the code style.

Directory structure

This repository not only contains the core Filament engine, but also its supporting libraries and tools.

License

Please see LICENSE.

Disclaimer

This is not an officially supported Google product.