Laura is a lightweight, Windows-only 3D path tracing engine. It focuses on rendering 3D scenes using path tracing, enabling developers to experiment with 3D light transport simulation in virtual environments. While not as feature-packed as larger engines, Laura provides a simple and approachable platform to learn and experiment with 3D rendering concepts.

Laura is completely free and open source under the permissive MIT license. Users are free to use, modify, and distribute their projects without royalties or restrictions. The engine is designed to be lightweight, accessible, and extendable, empowering developers to experiment with path tracing and 3D rendering techniques.

Editor

After designing and configuring your scene in the editor, export it via File → Export and run the generated application to see your work in action.

  
Left: exported runtime — Right: opening launch window of the editor.

The project is structured into three CMake targets:

• LauraEngine: The core engine as a static library. It implements the renderer, scene and asset systems, platform abstraction, and utility subsystems. Third-party dependencies (GLFW, GLEW, GLM, Assimp, spdlog, EnTT, yaml-cpp, stb) are vendored and built via CMake.
• LauraEditor: A fully-featured editor application (ImGui-based) for authoring projects, scenes, materials, and settings, backed by LauraEngine.
• LauraRuntime: A lean runtime player that loads and runs exported projects using LauraEngine.

• C++20 across all targets
• Path tracing pipeline using OpenGL compute shaders and a clean renderer abstraction
• Editor tooling built with ImGui/ImPlot
• Scene/entity system with EnTT
• Asset loading (Assimp, stb-image)
• Structured logging via spdlog

Laura currently targets Windows (x64) and builds with the MSVC toolchain.

• Windows 10/11 (x64)
• Visual Studio 2022 with C++ toolset (or MSVC via Build Tools)
• CMake 3.26+

git clone --recursive <this-repo-url> Laura
cd Laura
git submodule update --init --recursive

1. File → Open → CMake… → select the root CMakeLists.txt.

• Configuration: x64-Debug
• CMake variable: BUILD_INSTALL = OFF (default)
• Target (dropdown): LauraEditor.exe (Debug/LauraEditor.exe)

• Run: Start debugging to launch the editor in Debug.
• Note: LauraEngine builds automatically when required.

• Configuration: x64-Release (RelWithDebInfo)

• Target (dropdown): LauraEditor.exe (Install)

• Build: This performs the install step and stages a self‑contained layout under out/build/x64-Release/install/.
• Run: Launch the installed LauraEditor.exe from the install directory.

Laura/           # Engine library (source & resources)
LauraEditor/     # Editor application (ImGui-based)
LauraRuntime/    # Runtime player
<target>/Thirdparty/  # Target specific dependencies
SampleModels/    # Example assets
SampleSkyboxes/  # Example HDRs

• Ensure you cloned submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive.
• If resources are missing at runtime, re-follow the steps in How to Build with Visual Studio, then in Visual Studio choose Project → Delete Cache and Reconfigure.

• When switching between Dev build and Release / Shipping build, delete cache and reconfigure.
• Always delete cache and reconfigure when changing BUILD_INSTALL, ENABLE_CONSOLE, or the CMake generator.

Contributions are welcome. If extending Laura to additional platforms sounds interesting, a natural next step could be Linux and macOS support.