Nexium is a C library inspired by raylib, but focused on advanced 3D rendering. If you enjoy raylib’s simplicity but are looking for a modern all-in-one 3D framework, Nexium is for you.

⚠️ Nexium is in active development and not yet stable.

Features (so far)

3D Rendering

• Shading: full PBR (Burley/Schlick GGX) with roughness, metalness, occlusion, normal and emission maps.
• Materials texture scale/offset, alpha cutoff, cull and blend modes.
• Lighting: forward clustered lighting and soft shadows.
• Environment: cubemaps for skyboxes and basic reflection probes
• Post-processing: color adjustment, debanding, tonemapping (Reinhard, Filmic, ACES, AgX)

3D Models

• Meshes: cube, sphere, cylinder, cone, capsule
• Import: Assimp for 3D model and material loading
• Animations: rigged models, with animation blending support

2D Rendering

• Primitives: lines, triangles, quads, rectangles, circles, arcs, rings, rounded rectangles, etc.
• Textures: can be applied to all shapes
• Custom shapes: support for primitive lists, strips, fans, loops
• Text rendering: bitmap and SDF

Audio

• Playback: clips and streams, async decoding
• Multiple instances: same clip can play simultaneously

Math

• Helpers: wrapping, remap, angles, easings, common conversions/interpolations
• Vectors: 2D, 3D, 4D with add, subtract, scalar multiply, dot/cross product, lerp, etc.
• Quaternions: conversion to/from matrices and vectors, slerp, helpers, etc.
• Matrices: 3x3 and 4x4 for transformations, rotations, scaling, projections
• Color: manipulation and conversion (RGB/HSV), interpolation
• Transforms: 3D struct with translation, rotation, scale

Roadmap (before first release)

Here’s a checklist of the major features that are still missing:

• Instanced rendering
• Unlit rendering mode
• Wireframe rendering mode
• [X] Dynamic 3D geometry drawing
• Rendering to custom render targets
• Procedural skybox cubemap generation
• Dynamic reflection probes
• Screen space ambient occlusion
• Bloom in post process
• Fog effect
• Custom post-processing shaders
• Custom material shaders
• More flexible 2D rendering
• Gamepad support
• Audio spatialization

Getting Started

Requirements

First, to run Nexium you’ll need a GPU with OpenGL 4.5 or OpenGL ES 3.2 support.

To build the project, make sure you have:

• A C11/C++23 compiler
• CMake 3.20+
• Python 3.6+

Dependencies

Nexium depends on: SDL3, PhysFS, Freetype and Assimp

You can either install these manually, or clone Nexium with submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Bigfoot71/Nexium.git

`

If you already cloned without submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building

When configuring with CMake, enable vendored dependencies for any library not installed on your system:

cmake -DNX_SDL3_VENDORED=ON \
      -DNX_PHYSFS_VENDORED=ON \
      -DNX_FREETYPE_VENDORED=ON \
      -DNX_ASSIMP_VENDORED=ON \
      -B build
cmake --build build

Documentation

You can also generate the Doxygen documentation while building the project by enabling it in CMake:

cmake -DNX_BUILD_DOCS=ON -B build
cmake --build build --target docs

Contributing

Nexium is actively being developed. Pull requests, feedback, and bug reports are very welcome!

Dependencies

Thanks to the amazing open source projects that power Nexium:

• Assimp

• drlibs

• FP16

• freetype

• glad

• mojoAL

• PhysFS

• SDL

• stb

Examples

License

Licensed under the Zlib License - see LICENSE for details.