Tantalum is a physically based 2D renderer written out of personal interest. The idea of this project was to build a light transport simulation using the same mathematical tools used in academic and movie production renderers, but in a simplified 2D setting. The 2D setting allows for faster render times and a more accessible way of understanding and interacting with light, even for people with no prior knowledge or interest in rendering.
Tantalum is written in JavaScript and WebGL.
To give developers as much freedom as is reasonable, Tantalum is distributed under the libpng/zlib license. This allows you to modify, redistribute and sell all or parts of the code without attribution.
Note that Tantalum includes several third-party libraries in the src/thirdparty folder that come with their own licenses. Please see the LICENSE.txt file for more information.
The only thing that needs to be compiled are the shaders, contained in the shaders subfolder. The compile_shaders.py script will turn those text files into a list of strings in a JS file (needs Python 3).