Light Field Particle System

The goal of this thesis is to propose and implement a method combining light field and particle effects. Particles are rendered as billboards and their textures are created with synthetic light field, which is dynamically generated at runtime. Particles can also use several of these textures at the same time. The thesis also includes several implemented scenes demonstrating various functionality and measurements comparing proposed method with standard 3D rendering techniques.

Simple demo video can be found here or in the video folder

+---application         Implemented application
|   +---assets          Assets, this folder is copied to build folder
|   |   +---imgs        Images, for skyboxes
|   |   +---models      Models for generating light fields
|   |   +---shaders     Containts all used shader programs
|   +---include         Libs and submodules
|   +---scripts         Scripts for benchmarking, graphs, etc.
|   +---src             Source files
+---binaries            Contains executables of application
|   +---windows         Executable file for windows (+ assets)
|   +---linux           Executable file for linux (+ assets)
+---text                Thesis text in PDF
|   +---source          Tex source files for PDF
+---video               Simple demo video

Setup

Repository

This thesis is also avaiable on Github. You can clone this repository by running:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/JanSkvaril/LightFieldParticleSystem.git

--recursive flag is required, because repository contains two submodules

Compile

For compilation you must have cmake installed. Program was compilled by Visual Studio Community 2022 compiler on windows and GPP on linux. At least OpenGL 4.X must be installed and it must be supported by your GPU.

Windows

Majority of development of this thesis was done in Visual Studio 2022 with C++ extention.

In application folder:

mkdir build
cd build

Then run cmake

cmake ..

And build the application

cmake --build . --target light_field_ps_bp --config Release --parallel 12

and run the application

.\Release\light_field_ps_bp.exe

You can also use visual studio to run the solution

Linux

Before compilation, install necessary dependencies:

# Build essentials:
    sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
# NanoGUI:
    sudo apt-get install -y cmake xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev
# OpenGL:
    sudo apt-get install -y mesa-common-dev mesa-utils freeglut3-dev 

In application folder:

mkdir build
cd build

Then run cmake

cmake ..

And build the application

cmake --build . --parallel 12

and run the application

./light_field_ps_bp