Kiss3d

Keep It Simple, Stupid 3d graphics engine.

This library is born from the frustration in front of the fact that today’s 3D graphics library are:

• either too low level: you have to write your own shaders and opening a window steals you 8 hours, 300 lines of code and 10L of coffee.
• or high level but too hard to understand/use: those are libraries made to write beautiful animations or games. They have a lot of feature; too much feature if you only want to draw a few geometries on the screen.

kiss3d is not designed to be feature-complete or fast. It is designed to be able to draw simple geometric figures and play with them with one-liners.

An on-line version of this documentation is available here.

Features

Most features are one-liners.

• WASM compatibility.
• open a window with a default arc-ball camera and a point light.
• a first-person camera is available too and user-defined cameras are possible.
• display boxes, spheres, cones, cylinders, quads and lines.
• change an object color or texture.
• change an object transform (we use the nalgebra library to do that).
• create basic post-processing effects.

As an example, having a red, rotating cube with the light attached to the camera is as simple as (NOTE: this will not compile when targeting WASM):

extern crate kiss3d;
extern crate nalgebra as na;

use na::{Vector3, UnitQuaternion};
use kiss3d::window::Window;
use kiss3d::light::Light;

fn main() {
    let mut window = Window::new("Kiss3d: cube");
    let mut c      = window.add_cube(1.0, 1.0, 1.0);

    c.set_color(1.0, 0.0, 0.0);

    window.set_light(Light::StickToCamera);

    let rot = UnitQuaternion::from_axis_angle(&Vector3::y_axis(), 0.014);

    while window.render() {
        c.prepend_to_local_rotation(&rot);
    }
}

The same example, but that will compile for both WASM and native platforms is slightly more complicated because kiss3d must control the render loop:

extern crate kiss3d;
extern crate nalgebra as na;

use kiss3d::light::Light;
use kiss3d::scene::SceneNode;
use kiss3d::window::{State, Window};
use na::{UnitQuaternion, Vector3};

struct AppState {
    c: SceneNode,
    rot: UnitQuaternion<f32>,
}

impl State for AppState {
    fn step(&mut self, _: &mut Window) {
        self.c.prepend_to_local_rotation(&self.rot)
    }
}

fn main() {
    let mut window = Window::new("Kiss3d: wasm example");
    let mut c = window.add_cube(1.0, 1.0, 1.0);

    c.set_color(1.0, 0.0, 0.0);

    window.set_light(Light::StickToCamera);

    let rot = UnitQuaternion::from_axis_angle(&Vector3::y_axis(), 0.014);
    let state = AppState { c, rot };

    window.render_loop(state)
}

Some controls are handled by default by the engine (they can be overridden by the user):

• scroll: zoom in / zoom out.
• left click + drag: look around.
• right click + drag: translate the view point.
• enter: look at the origin (0.0, 0.0, 0.0).

Compilation

You will need the last stable build of the rust compiler and the official package manager: cargo.

Simply add the following to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
kiss3d = "0.23"

Contributions

I’d love to see people improving this library for their own needs. However, keep in mind that kiss3d is KISS. One-liner features (from the user point of view) are preferred.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the Rustaceans for their help, and their OpenGL bindings.