Google releases open source rendering engine "Filament"

Regnas · August 4, 2018, 2:08pm

Filament is a physically based rendering engine for Android, Windows, Linux and macOS

drgci · August 4, 2018, 2:25pm

Rendering engine without 3d modelling software it’s useless

Harley · August 4, 2018, 11:10pm

A real time physically-based render engine with an Apache license is far far from useless. Potentially lots of interesting stuff in there to learn from and/or steal. Check out all the Blender monkeys in the docs!

BeerBaron · August 4, 2018, 11:50pm

Quiet in the peanut gallery!

This engine is used in Sceneform, for developers to create AR content for Android.

It could be used in other software as well, but I’d like to point out that it has very nice documentation which is pretty good teaching material.

Ace_Dragon · August 4, 2018, 11:57pm

While it is nice that the engine is Open Source, I am skeptical of Google having a long term commitment to the project when looking at their track record.

In many cases, Google will drop or deprecate a project after a few years unless it shows itself to be a huge revenue generator (does anyone of any recent stories related to Google Fiber, Sketchup, ect…)? They’re even dropping their music product in favor of starting over.

m9105826 · August 5, 2018, 2:41am

Wow, even with some sections still being written, that documentation is easily the best, most accessible explanation of some of the principles of PBR I’ve ever come across. This will be an invaluable resource to researchers and programmers.

sasa42 · August 3, 2019, 4:30pm

It s an documentation you can t stop reading until finished.

anon27868450 · August 11, 2019, 7:24pm

I’m not so sure …
consider that the hardware / future is turning towards realtime rendering …
and the next step forward is on internet is simulate “realistic” virtual worlds …
certainly knowing google is all to see, it is his way of dealing with new projects with his eternal “beta” … and if they do not go aside them … but usually changes the skills gained in new types of projects …

Filament is Google’s real-time physically based rendering engine that supports Android along with Linux and all other major platforms, including a target for WebAssembly+WebGL. Filament 1.2.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest step forward for this PBR rendering engine.

(ps … in the official site there is Suzanne rendered in real time in the browser as if it were an image)
https://google.github.io/filament/

v1.2.0

prideout released this on 24 Apr · 425 commits to master since this release

This release is motivated by a need to update npm, which was last updated in December 2018 with
v1.1.0. Some of the changes since then:

Features

Materials

Added getWorldFromClipMatrix() API

Added flipUV property to enable/disable UV Y coordinate flipping

Added curvatureToRoughness property for specular anti-aliasing

Added limitOverInterpolation property for specular anti-aliasing

Use getUserTime() to get the current time in seconds. See Renderer::resetUserTime() for more information

Tools

New glslminifier tool to reduce the size of built-in GLSL shaders

matc features are now part of libfilamat to generate materials at runtime

resgen tool to embed data in binaries (pre-compiled materials, etc.)

Engine

VertexBuffer builder normalized() method now accepts a boolean

View::setFrontFaceWindingInverted can be used to change the winding order of front faces. This is useful for mirrored rendering (reflections, etc.)

Added View::setRenderQuality API. It currently allows the use of an R11G11B10F HDR color buffer instead of RGB[A]16F

Added the ability to set the polygon offset on a material instance

Added API to compute tangent frame from vertex data (in VertexBuffer )

Samples

snorm16 UVs if UVs are in the range -1..1

New webpack/TypeScript demos

Added gltf_viewer sample

Enhancements

Engine

Exposed tangent utility to Java/Kotlin

Allow mutation of non-direct buffers in Java/JNI

FrameGraph is now enabled internally

Improved render target management

Added addEntities to Scene

Windows debug libraries are now part of the distribution

Add new queries to TransformManager and Scene

Mipmaps are now generated using the GPU for both Vulkan and OpenGL

Improved job system performance, especially under contention

Removed obsolete documentation about static lights

Improved skinning memory usage

Improved job system performance

Set CPU affinity on job system threads on Android to avoid core hopping/cache thrashing

Froxelization now runs during the shadow pass for improved parallelism

Lights culling is now parallelized with renderables culling

Various performance and code size optimizations

Use compile-time hashing in StaticString

The JavaScript API now supports compressed textures

Disabled depth prepass in the WebGL builds

Web

Added more JavaScript bindings

Added more TypeScript annotations

Android

Upgraded samples to Android Studio 3.3 and Kotlin 1.3.10

Improved rendering to TextureView

API level requirement on Android was lowered from 24 to 21

Reduced the size of the release AAR by ~150 KiB

UiHelper can now create transparent render targets

Added a transparent render target demo

Vulkan

Added support for RGB textures

Rendering

Replace Cloth DFG approximation with DFG LUT

Add clearCoatIorChange property to materials

Continued to improve Metal support

Always recenter the world origin to the camera position (improves precision)

Enable the FrameGraph for post-processing

Add an option to turn dithering on/off

Implemented blit in Vulkan

Simplified command buffer management in Vulkan

Progress on Metal backend

Tools

Introduce MATERIAL_VERSION ( this breaks older Materials )

Cleaned-up and simplified filabridge and filaflat

New gltfio library to more easily support gltf

API change: rename matrix factory functions

New ibl library split from cmgen

The filamat library is now available as a library to generate materials at runtime

Improved linear to sRGB conversion functions

Improved skygen rendering

Added 4 channel versions of image operations

Filamesh now generates dummy UV sets when necessary

Build

Android standalone toolchains are not longer necessary

Linux CI builds are now compiled with clang 7.0 instead of clang 5.0

Materials

Shader optimizations are now on by default

Shader optimizations can now be applied to materials that use external textures

Use smol-v to compress SPIR-V shaders

Here are a few sample materials rendered with Filament:

demo realtime on browser…
https://google.github.io/filament/webgl/

3dcgfx · August 15, 2019, 3:42am

I wonder why they put the disclaimer at the bottom, I guess if it’s now open source anything could go with the code

"Disclaimer

This is not an officially supported Google product."