60Hz Libraries

	Last updated: 22nd March 2004 Contact us: 60hz@csse.uwa.edu.au
Real-time Rendering Group Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia	"If you can't do it in realtime, it's not worth doing"

The Clean Rendering Libraries

This page contains information on and links to releases of the Clean Rendering Libraries.

Clean is a set of libraries built to aid in OpenGL development. A common problem in OpenGL application development comes from the fact that OpenGL provides rendering methods, but no common data formats (for models, textures etc.). This is ideal for flexibility because many data formats can be supported, but does impose the responsibility of data structure design and i/o to the programmer. For novice programmers, this can be quite a burden. Clean provides a layer above OpenGL with a set of methods to handle data in its own format. We have adopted simple data structures for realtime rendering applications (triangular meshes) and use method names very similar to OpenGL. Hopefully, this will provide an easier path to OpenGL for novice programmers.

Clean consists of three libraries:

CL is a thin library that makes OpenGL easier to code for. It provides "wrapper" structs and corresponding functions that encapsulate OpenGL data and methods
CLU complements CL and provides convenience and maths functions as well as some structs for common 3D operations (eg. quaternions)
CLIO provides input/output for common file formats. It uses OpenIL for image file handling. It provides its own .ply and .3ds importers.

Documentation

Notice: Clean is still a work in progress! As a result, the Clean documentation is not yet mature. For example, groups of similar functions are described rather than individual functions. However, we believe that the documentation is adequate as a guide to using Clean.

Downloads

Notice: Clean is still a work in progress! Although CL has changed very little in the last 9 months, CLU and CLIO are still under regular development. Expect some errors or limited functionality.

The Clean Rendering Libraries are available as one large tarball containing all libraries or as seperate libraries. The reason we have seperated the libraries is because not everyone will require all libraries (clearly the file sizes are not an issue!).