changelog.md

Changelog

0.1.0

1. For built-in fragment shader outputs, a new field use_default_depth is added (default False) instead of relying on checking if gl_FragDepth is NaN.
2. Change ZBuffer value meaning to OpenGL convention: all values are non-negative, and the smaller the value, the closer the point is to the camera.
3. Change default Shader.mixer behaviour: now it picks the fragment with minimum depth value gl_FragDepth.
4. Change shadow.py::Shadow.render_shadow_map according to the z-value definition change, to add into the shadow map instead of subtracting so to move shadow maps further away from the "camera" (light).
5. Change shaders/phong_reflection_shadow according to the z-value definition change.
6. Transform shadow coordinates in VS (world => NDC) and FS (NDC => screen) instead of transforming in FS (model's screen => world => screen) to avoid precision loss in inverse matrix computation.
7. Fix issue of perspective-correction barycentric interpolation in pipeline.
8. Fix shaders/phong* so normals are correctly transformed into pre-projection eye coordinates, rather than being projected.
9. Rename ModelView => View, model_view => view, model_view_matrix => view_matrix as the matrix is actually view matrix that transforms from world to eye space, not model view matrix (model to eye space).

0.1.1

1. Change the default behaviour of renderer/utils.py::transpose_for_display which will flip vertically as well by default, so the origin of the resultant matrix will be (height, width, channels) and with the origin located at the top-left corner. The previous behaviour can be achieved by setting flip_vertical=False.
2. Scene.add_cube now accepts one number for texture_scaling to scale texture map equally in both x and y directions.
3. Fix some assert message issues (in Scene.add_cube).
4. CameraParameters now accepts position, target and up in Python's tuples of floats as well, along with jnp.array.
5. Scene.set_object_orientation and Scene.set_object_local_scaling supports tuple of floats as well as inputs, additional to jnp.array.
6. Model now has a convenient method create to create a Model with same face indices shared by faces, faces_norm and faces_uv, and a default specular_map. This is useful for creating a mesh where all vertices has its own normal and uv coordinate specified, under same order (thus same face indices).
7. Correctly support Python Sequence for utils.build_texture_from_PyTinyrenderer as texture.
8. quaternion function to create an orientation from axis and angle, and quaternion_mul to composite quaternion.
9. rotation_matrix function to create a rotation matrix from axis and angle. Also allows Scene to set object orientation directly using rotation matrix.
10. Move Renderer.merge_objects into geometry.py, and expose in __init__.py.
11. batch_models and Renderer.create_buffers convenient method to facilitate batch rendering of multiple models.

0.1.2

1. Change the ordering of quaternions (in geometry.py) to (w, x, y, z) instead of (x, y, z, w) to be consistent with the convention used in pytinyrenderer and BRAX. Reference: brax/math.py.
2. Fix: remove unnecessary @staticmethod decorator in merge_objects.
3. Changed the way that Camera is created in Renderer.create_camera_from_parameters to force convert parameters into float weak type.
4. Force convert LightParameters to JAX arrays in Renderer.get_camera_image to avoid downstream errors.
5. Downgrade minimum Python version to 3.9, numpy version to 1.22.0, jax and jaxlib version to 0.4.4.

0.1.3

1. Correctly force convert LightParameters to JAX arrays in Renderer.get_camera_image to avoid downstream errors.
2. Fix geometry.py::transform_matrix_from_rotation. Also, change the order of quaternion to (w, x, y, z) instead of (x, y, z, w) for consistency.
3. Force convert ShadowParameters to JAX arrays in Renderer.get_camera_image to avoid downstream errors.

0.2.0

1. Instead of clipping (planned to be implemented), now the rasteriser interpolates in homogeneous space directly. Shader.interpolate will not receive valid barycentric_screen values for now. Setting Interpolation.SMOOTH and Interpolation.NOPERSPECTIVE will result in same results, perspective-correct interpolations.
2. Reorganise example files and rename them.

0.2.1

1. Refactor Scene.set_object_* methods to be a simple wrapper of self._replace and ModelObject.replace_with_*, to expose APIs of ModelObjects and allows manipulation and rendering without Scene.
2. Expose create_capsule and create_cube APIs.

0.3.0

1. Fix gl_FrontFacing computation in pipeline so it is consistent to comment: True if not back-facing (i.e. front-facing & side facing).
2. Add an extra stage Shader.primitive_chooser to choose which primitive to be rendered for each fragment. The default implementation is provided, which assumes that the depth is just the interpolated z value in the eye space. It just picks the values of the single primitive that is closest to the camera and is not discarded in the previous pipeline.
3. Expose loop_unroll static option to allow unrolling several operations (row rendering) within a single iteration of the out-most loop (iterating along first axis of the canvas). This may be useful in some cases for performance improvement, but careful benchmarking is needed to determine the optimal value. The default value is 1 (no unrolling) as it is the most general case in larger canvases (benchmarked on 960x540 using GPU T4 in Colab).
4. Bump the minimum Python version to Python 3.10
5. Lower the minimum jax & jaxlib version to 0.3.25.

0.3.1

1. Lower minimum Python version to 3.8
2. Introducing type_extensions package and improved typing annotations.

0.3.2

1. Bump minimum jax and jaxlib version to 0.4.0 as jaxtyping does not support jax 0.3.25.
2. Bug fix: add static_argnames for utility function transpose_for_display.
3. Change to isort + black code style.
4. Migrate full codebase to be type-checked with pyright.
5. Add smoke tests, and use GitHub Action as CI to run them.