Software rendering 3D

Software Rendering Playground is a fully 3D graphics project built from scratch in C++ using SDL3, without relying on any GPU graphics APIs such as OpenGL, DirectX, or Vulkan. Everything you see on the screen is computed manually on the CPU.

Some scenes have camera movement.
Triangle Texture Scene and the Ray Tracing Scene, you can move and rotate the camera using:

• WASD → movement

• Arrow Keys → looking around

The renderer includes:

• Texture mapping

• Loading and displaying .OBJ 3D models

• A simple camera system with movement and rotation

• Vertex and wireframe visualization modes

• ImGui interface to switch between scenes and examples

• A CPU-only Ray Tracer, implemented entirely without any graphics API

This project is a deep dive into the fundamentals of 3D computer graphics — rasterization, matrix math, shading, and scene management — all implemented step by step at the software level.

It was heavily inspired by two excellent resources:

• Pikuma – Learn 3D Computer Graphics Programming
  https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-programming

• Computer Graphics From Scratch by Gabriel Gambetta
  https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/