Renderling is an innovative, GPU-driven renderer designed for efficient scene rendering with a focus on leveraging GPU capabilities for nearly all rendering operations. Utilizing Rust for shader development, it ensures memory safety and cross-platform compatibility, including web platforms. The project, currently in the alpha stage, aims for rapid loading of GLTF files, handling large scenes, and supporting numerous lights. Development emphasizes performance, ergonomics, observability and the use of modern rendering techniques like forward+ rendering and physically based shading.

Read the manual to get started.

Read the docs for more info.

Visit https://renderling.xyz to read the development blog.

This project is funded through NGI Zero Commons, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the 2025 NLnet project page and the 2024 NLnet project page.

This is very much a work in progress.

renderling holds entire scenes of geometry, textures, materials, lighting, even the scene graph itself - in GPU buffers. All but a few of the rendering operations happen on the GPU. The CPU is used to interact with the filesystem to marshall data to the GPU and to update transforms.

Shaders are written in Rust, via rust-gpu.

• Data is easily staged on the GPU using an automatically reference counted slab allocator that provides access from the CPU.

  Your scene geometry, materials, animations - all of it - live on the GPU, while the CPU has easy access to read and modify that data, without borrowing - allowing you to send your data through threads to anything that needs it.

• Having everything on the GPU makes renderling very effective at rendering certain types of scenes.

  Specifically renderling aims to be good at rendering scenes with a moderate level of unique geometry, (possibly a large amount of repeated geometry), with a small number of large textures (or large number of small textures), and lots of lighting effects.

• Tight integration with GLTF:

  • Loading scenes, nodes, animations etc
  • Includes tools for controlling animations
  • Supported extensions:
    • KHR_lights_punctual
    • KHR_materials_unlit
    • KHR_materials_emissive_strength

• Image based lighting + analytical lighting

• Good documentation

• simple structs represent nodes, meshes, materials and lights
• seamless GPU / CPU syncronization
• headless rendering support
  • rendering to texture and saving via image crate
• text and user interface rendering support
• nested nodes with local transforms
• tight integration with glTF (cargo feature gltf - on by default)

Shaders are written in Rust via rust-gpu where possible, falling back to wgsl where needed.

Renderling takes a forward+ approach to rendering.

By default it uses a single uber-shader for rendering.

• texture atlas

  • automatic resource management (Arc/drop based)
  • BCn compression

• GPU slab allocator

  • automatic resource management (Arc/drop based)

• frustum culling

• occlusion culling - in progress

• Built-in support for common lighting/material workflows

  • physically based shading
  • unlit

• forward+ style light tiling/light culling

• shadow mapping

  • shadow mapping from image-based lighting

• ssao

• msaa

• bloom "physically based" up+downsampling blur

• depth of field

• high dynamic range

• skybox

• image based lighting

  • diffuse
  • specular

• order independent transparency

• entirely too much raymarching

• gltf support

  • scenes
  • nodes
  • cameras
  • meshes
  • materials
    • pbr metallic roughness (factors + textures)
    • normal mapping
    • occlusion textures
    • pbr specular glossiness
    • parallax mapping
  • textures, images, samplers
  • animation
    • interpolation
    • skinning
    • morph targets

• 2d (renderling-ui)

  • text
  • stroked and filled paths
    • circles
    • rectangles
    • cubic beziers
    • quadratic beziers
    • arbitrary polygons
    • fill w/ image

renderling noun

A small beast that looks cute up close, ready to do your graphics bidding.

Ghost in the machine, lighting your scene with magic. Cute technology.

• crates/renderling

  Main library crate. Contains CPU Rust code for creating pipelines and managing resources, making render passes, etc. Contains GPU Rust code of the shader operations themselves. Contains tests, some using image comparison of actual frame renders for consistency and backwards compatibility.

• crates/renderling/shaders

  Contains .spv and .wgsl files generated by cargo-gpu.

• crates/renderling/src/linkage*

  Contains autogenerated wgpu linkage for the generated shaders.

• img

  Image assets for tests (textures, etc.)

• test_img

  Reference images to use for testing.

• crates/example

  Contains an example of using the renderling crate to make an application.

Tests use renderling in headless mode and generate images that are compared to expected output.

cargo test

The crates/renderling/shaders/ folder contains the generated SPIR-V files.

To regenerate the shaders, run:

cargo shaders

And to explicitly re-generate wgpu linkage, you can run:

cargo linkage

...but the build.rs script will do this for you, so it's not strictly necessary.

RUSTFLAGS=--cfg=web_sys_unstable_apis trunk build crates/example-wasm/index.html && basic-http-server -a 127.0.0.1:8080 crates/example-wasm/dist

This work will always be free and open source. If you use it (outright or for inspiration), please consider donating.

💰 Sponsor 💝

• James Harton (@jimsynz) for donating multiple linux CI runners with physical GPUs!

Many projects were born from first solving a need within renderling. Some of these solutions were then spun off into their own projects.

• wgsl-rs Write WGSL shaders using a subset of Rust and run them on CPU and GPU
• crabslab and craballoc A slab allocator for working across CPU/GPU boundaries.
• loading-bytes A cross-platform (including the web) and comedically tiny way of loading files to bytes.
• moongraph A DAG and resource graph runner.
• Contributions to naga
  • Adding atomics support to the SPIR-V frontend
• Contributions to gltf
• cargo-gpu A shader compilation cli tool.

Sponsoring this project contributes to the ecosystem.

Renderling is free and open source. All code in this repository is dual-licensed under either:

MIT License (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option. This means you can select the license you prefer! This dual-licensing approach is the de-facto standard in the Rust ecosystem and there are very good reasons to include both.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

I keep a list of (un)organized notes about this project here. I keep a devlog at the official website https://renderling.xyz/devlog/index.html.