Software Rendering in 500 Lines of Bare C++
I guide students through building a software renderer from scratch using only 500 lines of bare C++. By avoiding third-party libraries and graphics APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan, we manually implement core concepts to understand how modern 3D graphics actually work. This hands-on approach transforms complex theory into a tangible project, proving that deep understanding comes from writing the code yourself rather than relying on pre-built tools.
I do not intend to show how to write GPU applications — I want to show how they work.
- articulatepang
I went through this a few months ago in Rust. I wrote all the code by hand, no LLMs. Then I went ahead and added a small "game" on top, plus some special effects like pixelization shaders and chromatic aberration at the edge of a flashlight.
https://github.com/kshitijl/tinyrenderer-rs
if anyone is interested! The repo has lots and lots of in-progress screenshots so you can see the renderer come to life, plus all the hilarious visual bugs along the way.
I learned a lot! My biggest lesson, other than the specifics of how rendering works, was that modern CPUs are really fast: a single-threaded CPU renderer can definitely run an interactive 3D game with some fancy special effects.
- nkanaev
This resource, along with Mathematics for Computer Graphics by John Vince [1], was truly indispensable when I wrote my own software renderer [2]. This was long before LLMs, so the whole process took me at least a couple months - most of it trying to wrap my head around math behind computer graphics and tracking down C segmentation faults. Fun times.
[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Computer-Graphics-John-...
- bob1029
I wish we could have just one of these tutorials properly cover the concern of triangle clipping. This is the part that I struggle with the most in a software renderer. If you are going to be building a practical one, this is something you will eventually have to deal with, even for super basic scenes. Any time geometry intersects the view frustum you need to clip those triangles.
- espetro
Finally an engineering feat that's not built in Rust
- atan2
on the topic of software rendering, im surprised how little gustavo pezzi's lectures get mentioned here on hacker news.