TinyRenderer

Tiny Renderer (tinyrenderer by ssloy) is a lightweight educational software rasterizer that illustrates how OpenGL works by implementing a mini rendering pipeline in around 500 lines of code—serving as a compact, instructive graphics project. The final code consists of about 500 lines. My students typically require 10 to 20 hours of programming to start producing such renderers. The input is a 3D model composed of a triangulated mesh and textures. The output is a rendering. There is no graphical interface; the program simply generates an image. To minimize external dependencies, I provide my students with a single class for handling TGA files — one of the simplest formats supporting RGB, RGBA, and grayscale images. This serves as our foundation for image manipulation. At the beginning, the only available functionality (besides loading and saving images) is the ability to set the color of a single pixel.