Headless rendering

This tutorial explains how to render and save images from a terminal without any display device.

Note

This feature is experimental; it was only tested with Ubuntu 16.04 environment.

Install OSMesa

To generate a headless context, it is necessary to install OSMesa.

$ sudo apt-get install libosmesa6-dev

Otherwise, a recent version of OSMesa can be built from source.

# download OSMesa 2018 release
$ cd
$ wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/mesa-18.0.0.tar.gz
$ tar xf mesa-18.0.0.tar.gz
$ cd mesa-18.0.0/

# configure compile option and build
$ ./configure --enable-osmesa --disable-driglx-direct --disable-gbm --enable-dri --with-gallium-drivers=swrast
$ make

# add OSMesa to local path.
$ export PATH=$PATH:~/mesa-18.0.0

Install virtualenv

The next step is to make a virtual environment for Python.

$ sudo apt-get install virtualenv python-pip
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 py3env
$ source py3env/bin/activate
(py3env) $ pip install numpy matplotlib

This script installs and activates py3env. The necessary modules, numpy and matplotlib, are installed in py3env.

Error

Anaconda users are recommended to use this configuration as conda install matplotlib installs additional modules that are not based on OSMesa. This will result in segmentation fault error at runtime.

Build Open3D with OSMesa

Let’s move to build a folder.

(py3env) $ cd ~/Open3D/
(py3env) $ mkdir build && cd build

In the next step, there are two cmake flags that need to be specified.

  • -DENABLE_HEADLESS_RENDERING=ON: this flag informs glew and glfw should use OSMesa.

  • -DBUILD_GLEW=ON -DBUILD_GLFW=ON: note that headless rendering only works with the glew 2.1 and glfw 3.3-dev version. In most cases, these versions are not installed in vanilla Ubuntu systems. Use these CMake options to force to build glew 2.1 and glfw 3.3-dev from source.

As a result, the cmake command is the following

(py3env) $ cmake -DENABLE_HEADLESS_RENDERING=ON \
                 -DBUILD_GLEW=ON \
                 -DBUILD_GLFW=ON \
                 -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/python3 \
                 ..

Note that -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/python3 is the same path that was used for Install virtualenv.

If cmake successfully generates makefiles, build Open3D.

(py3env) $ make # or make -j in multi-core machine

Test headless rendering

As a final step, test a python script that saves depth and surface normal sequences.

(py3env) $ cd ~/Open3D/build/lib/Tutorial/Advanced/
(py3env) $ python headless_rendering.py

This should print the following:

Capture image 00000
Capture image 00001
Capture image 00002
Capture image 00003
Capture image 00004
Capture image 00005
:
Capture image 00030

Rendered images are at ~/Open3D/build/lib/TestData/depth and the image folder.

Note

headless_rendering.py saves png files.
This may take some time, so try to tweak the script for your purpose.

Error

If glew and glfw did not correctly link with OSMesa, it may crash with the following error.
GLFW Error: X11: The DISPLAY environment variable is missing. Failed to initialize GLFW
Try cmake with -DBUILD_GLEW=ON and -DBUILD_GLFW=ON flags.