Ecena is a 3D Scene rendering program currently being written in C++. It takes a JSON-like object as the description of a scene and spits out the corresponding 3D world.

The project has two main parts:

1. Domain-specific language. This is a Json-like language that you need to use to describe the scene you want Ecena to render. Note that Ecena doesn't offer a UI, so the only way to directly communicate with the renderer is by using the DSL (though nothing's stopping you from building your own UI). To learn more about the DSL, head to the DSL wiki page
2. Rendering engine. This is the one responsible for the drawing of the 3D world.

If you want to build Ecena outside of CLion, you first need to install cmake on your machine (refer to your operating system's installation instructions).

After that, you can enter the following commands:

$ cd <path-to-ecena>
$ cmake .
$ cmake --build . --target ecena

The second command is needed to generate the build files.

If everything is successful, you should see a file named ecena generated in the current directory.

Building the tests is similar to building the main module, except the target's name would be ecena_tests as opposed to ecena:

cmake --build . --target ecena_tests

Entering ./ecena_tests into the terminal should execute the tests and report the results.

While you can certainly write simple scenes directly in JSON, for more complicated scenes, a more expressive language that can generate JSON data is recommended. This project ships with examples, written in Python, that you can test and examine.

The Python script for the image above can be found here. To pass its output to Ecena, you just use the pipe operator:

$ python3 ./examples/amalgamation.py | <path-to-ecena>/ecena

Of course, you can also just print the output directly to see the generated JSON:

$ python3 ./examples/amalgamation.py

Here's another example, called Esena (named after another Ray Tracer project of mine, which outputs only a single image, a variant of the one below), with the corresponding script here:

Primary resource for the Ray Tracer: The Ray Tracer Challenge. This book also serves as a source for test data and scenarios.