This sample project and library demonstrates basic rendering of wireframes in 3D in software only. No hardware acceleration is used. Currently, no z-buffering or clipping is performed. This may change if either I decide to implement them, or, if you decide to implement them, in which case you should open a pull request =). However, you can find a fast draft of the Liang-Barsky algorithm that I haven't tested in mathutil.py.

This is a continuation of a final project for CIS 192 at the University of Pennsylvania. The primary purpose of this project is to be educational. This is probably not intended for production usage, but you are more than welcome to use it for that purpose.

This project should work with the latest versions of numpy and pygame. You can refer to the websites of those respective packages for installation help.

Simply download the project sources and run main.py.

This project does not rely on hardware 3D, so it should run on any system.

Simply running python main.py will launch a basic viewer, which uses WASD and mouse for basic interaction.

Run python main.py --help for command-line usage options.

The sample viewer follows a MVC design. The file game.py contains the Game controller, which manipulates the underlying view, which is given as a constructor argument. There are currently two different kinds of cameras provided to render scenes: OrthographicViewport and PerspectiveViewport, utilizing orthographic projection and perspective projection, respectively.

Creating your own custom viewport is rather simple. Simply extend Viewport, and override the relevant functions (most likely just update_projection_matrix and to_view_coords).

A wireframe model (classes extending Model from model.py) is simply a collection of edges, and represents that object in its own coordinate system with its own scale. Drawable objects should extend Model (c.f. Cube in shapes.py).

You can use the code of this project in full (or any part thereof) in any commercial or non-commercial code. You might want to check with your instructor if you want to use the code within a homework assignment.