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Top 23 C++ 3d-graphic Projects
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Project mention: Tiny renderer or how OpenGL works: software rendering in 500 lines of code | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-13
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InfluxDB
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3d-game-shaders-for-beginners
🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.
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filament
Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 (by google)
Filament - A modern, efficient graphics engine suitable for real-time rendering, link: http://google.github.io/filament.
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o3de
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.
O3DE came from Amazon Lumberyard which came from CryEngine, so it's quite possibly one of the better looking open source 3D game engines that you can currently get, no strings attached: https://github.com/o3de/o3de
Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a community around it.
Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has up until now.
There's also more niche options like Stride (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.
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Project mention: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-14
Multi thread support is an experimental feature available on nightly build (and needing to be enabled). The bug tracking it is interesting to read, it has been a long journey... https://github.com/openscad/openscad/issues/391
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draco
Draco is a library for compressing and decompressing 3D geometric meshes and point clouds. It is intended to improve the storage and transmission of 3D graphics.
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SaaSHub
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MaterialX
MaterialX is an open standard for the exchange of rich material and look-development content across applications and renderers.
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Horde3D
Horde3D is a small 3D rendering and animation engine. It is written in an effort to create an engine being as lightweight and conceptually clean as possible.
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Project mention: Show HN: VSC – An open source 3D Rendering Engine in C++ | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-11
Is this a recreation of the venerable POV-RAY https://www.povray.org/ (30 years old now, wow)?
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HybridRenderingEngine
Clustered Forward/Deferred renderer with Physically Based Shading, Image Based Lighting and a whole lot of OpenGL.
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SoftGLRender
Tiny C++ Software Renderer / Rasterizer, and implements OpenGL and Vulkan renderers for comparison
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MethaneKit
🎲 Modern 3D graphics made simple with C++20 cross-platform framework and rendering abstraction API on top of DirectX 12, Vulkan & Metal
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LinaEngine
Lina Engine is an open-source , modular, tiny and fast C++ game engine, aimed to develop 3D desktop games.
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SaaSHub
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ 3d-graphics discussion
C++ 3d-graphics related posts
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Show HN: VSC – An open source 3D Rendering Engine in C++
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POV-Ray development is resuming
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Show HN: 3D rendering toolkit for Flutter and/or Dart
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Filament – A Language for Fearless Hardware Design
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OpenSCAD Survey - what programming language do you want to be added to app?
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OpenSCAD Survey - What should be improved ?
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remove fastcsg option
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 16 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source 3d-graphic projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | tinyrenderer | 21,830 |
| 2 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 18,498 |
| 3 | filament | 18,433 |
| 4 | o3de | 8,240 |
| 5 | openscad | 7,820 |
| 6 | draco | 6,765 |
| 7 | tinyraytracer | 5,147 |
| 8 | F3D | 3,441 |
| 9 | yocto-gl | 2,864 |
| 10 | tinykaboom | 2,370 |
| 11 | MaterialX | 1,984 |
| 12 | ezEngine | 1,692 |
| 13 | mayo | 1,611 |
| 14 | Horde3D | 1,561 |
| 15 | povray | 1,412 |
| 16 | HybridRenderingEngine | 1,278 |
| 17 | MxEngine | 1,190 |
| 18 | SoftGLRender | 1,055 |
| 19 | rbfx | 925 |
| 20 | MethaneKit | 913 |
| 21 | LinaEngine | 861 |
| 22 | liblava | 828 |
| 23 | StratusGFX | 743 |
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