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Sunflow is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. It is written in Java and built around a flexible ray tracing core and an extensible object-oriented design. It was created as a framework for experimenting with global illumination algorithms and new surface shading models.

Current Features

• Fully extensible architecture. Almost every aspect of the renderer can be customized.
• User extensible features are exposed as interfaces, making it easy to integrate into existing applications
• Simple API for procedural scene creation
• Direct Illumination with soft shadows from area lights
• Adaptive sampling of area light sources
• Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling architecture: all sampling operations are fully deterministic
• Depth of field
• Camera motion blur
• Multi-threading
• Photon Mapping (for global illumination and caustics)
• Run-time compilation of shaders (via Janino)
• Lazy processing of tesselation, acceleration structure building and texture loading
• Lightmap generation (render to texture)
• Instancing (many copies of the same object take up very little additional memory)

• Bucket renderer
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing (over and under sampling)
  • Bucket based rendering (programmable ordering)
  • Multi-pixel image filtering
• Progressive refinement renderer
• Texture mapping (JPG, PNG, TGA, HDR loaders)
• Bump mapping
• Normal mapping

• Custom scene format: basic translators exist for 3ds files and Blender
• Output formats: HDR, PNG, TGA, OpenEXR (tiled only)
• Written 100% in Java
• Simple Swing GUI with progressive rendering display and console.
• Simple Swing display driver that can be embedded in other applications.

• Primitives
  • Triangle mesh
  • Hair curves
  • Disk
  • Sphere
  • Torus
  • Banchoff surface
  • Bezier patches (built-in teapot and gumbo models) - tesselated on demand
  • Infinite plane
  • Cube-grid (eg: Menger Sponge)
  • Cornell Box
  • Julia Quaternion Fractal
  • Particle Surface (large sets of spheres)
  • Programmable (surfaces can be tesseleated by Java code compiled and executed on demand)
• Cameras lenses
  • Pinhole
  • Spherical (produces a longitude/lattitude environment map
  • Thinlens (produces depth of field effects, including bokeh)
  • Fisheye
• Ray intersection accelerators
  • SAH KD-Tree
  • Bounding Interval Hierarchy (paper)
  • Uniform grid
  • Bounding volume hierarchy
  • Null (for simple scenes)
• Surface shaders
  • Diffuse
  • Mirror
  • Glass (with absorbtion)
  • Phong (with glossy reflections)
  • Ambient occlusion
  • Shiny diffuse
  • Anisotropic ward
  • Wireframe
  • Programmable (in Java - compiled during scene loading)
• Surface modifiers
  • Bump mapping
  • Normal mapping
• Light sources
  • Point light
  • Directional spotlight
  • Triangle area light (paper)
  • Image-based infinite area light
  • Physically based sun/sky system (paper)
• Photon mapping engines
  • KD-Tree
  • Grid based
• Image filters
  • Box
  • Triangle
  • Gaussian
  • Blackman Harris
  • Catmull-Rom
  • Mitchell
  • Lanczos
  • Sinc
• Bucket orderings
  • Hilbert
  • Spiral
  • Row
  • Column
  • Diagonal
  • Random
• Global illumination engines
  • Irradiance caching
  • "Instant GI" - based on "Illumination in the Presence of Weak Singularities" (Thomas Kollig, Alexander Keller)
  • Path tracing
  • Fake ambient term
  • Ambient occlusion

Contributors:

• Robert Lindsay
  • Blender exporter
• Rami Jarakivi
  • TGA input/output
  • OpenEXR display driver
  • Swing GUI Drag and drop support
  • Various bug fixes and optimizations
• Kristoffer Berg
  • Website design
  • Logo design
• Artur Brinkmann
  • Documentation

Planned Features

• Documentation (!)
• Infinite progressive rendering
• Shader graphs
• Improved shader API
• Dataflow formulation of the rendering pipeline
• Advanced Swing GUI with support for all rendering options
• Volume shaders for participating media
• Geometric and light source motion blur
• Spectral rendering