nedtrender

Nedtrender is an open-source rendering engine designed for real-time and offline graphics tasks. It provides a modular, backend-agnostic framework intended for use in video games, simulations, and visualization tools. The project emphasizes performance, cross-platform support, and an extensible rendering pipeline.

Architecturally, Nedtrender separates a scene representation, a materials system, a render pipeline, and multiple backends for different graphics APIs. It supports rasterization with physically based rendering and optional ray tracing paths, unified shading, and post-processing. Features include global illumination options, tone mapping, depth of field, and motion blur. The engine provides backends for Vulkan, DirectX 12, Metal, and OpenGL, chosen at build time, along with scripting interfaces in Python and C++. A node-based material editor enables authoring materials without writing code.

History: Development began as a community project in the late 2010s. The first public release appeared in 2019, with subsequent major updates adding backends and features. Ongoing contributions come from volunteers and small studios, with a public repository hosting issues, discussions, and pull requests.

Usage and reception: Nedtrender is used by indie game developers, architectural visualization studios, and academic demos. Its modular design and clean codebase support experimentation and rapid prototyping, though documentation can be incomplete for new contributors. The project is distributed under a permissive open-source license to encourage adoption and extension.

As of 2024, Nedtrender remains under active development with regular updates and community discussions, and it continues to attract contributors from both independent studios and research institutions.