guacamole - An Extensible Scene Graph and Rendering Framework Based on Deferred Shading

In this paper, we present guacamole, a novel open source software framework for developing virtual-reality applications. It features a lightweight scene graph combined with a versatile deferred shading pipeline. In our deferred renderer, the geometry processing is decoupled from subsequent shading stages. This allows us to use the same flexible materials for various geometry types. Materials consist of multiple programmable shading stages and user-defined attributes. In contrast to other deferred shading implementations, our renderer automatically infers and generates the necessary buffer configurations and shader programs. We demonstrate the extensibility of our pipeline by showing how we added rendering support for non-polygonal data such as trimmed NURBS and volume data. Furthermore, guacamole features many state--of-the-art post-processing effects such as ambient occlusion or volumetric light. Our framework is also capable of rendering on multiple GPUs for the support of multi-screen displays and multi-user applications.