Visage is an open source 2D/3D Minecraft avatar rendering service. It's built on a job distribution system and hardware-accelerated OpenGL, making it extra-fast.

It's written in Java 8, and uses Jetty and LWJGL3 as backends for HTTP and rendering, respectively. It also requires a RabbitMQ server for job distribution, and a Redis server for caching. It is based on OpenGL 3.0, and uses VBOs to speed up rendering.

Visage is tested on Arch Linux with the Mesa RadeonSI open-source drivers. The offical server uses Debian with Mesa RadeonSI. Proprietary drivers are not supported, but will probably work. Windows is completely unsupported. Use it at your own peril.

There is an official hosted Visage site with full API documentation. This source repository is for developers looking to help out and sysadmins looking to run their own Visage servers.

If you want an avatar to use on other people's sites, you can go over to the official Visage site and use the Quick Render feature to generate a maximum-resolution render of your skin and download it to your computer.

A Visage distributor can be run rather simply, but first you need RabbitMQ and Redis. The RabbitMQ server should be accessible by any machines you plan on running as renderers, but the Redis server can be fully locked down.

RabbitMQ and Redis are available in most distro's repositories. On Debian/Ubuntu, you want rabbitmq-server and redis-server. On Arch Linux, you want redis and rabbitmq.

Please note that the default conf/distributor.conf file is set up for development use, and has some rather low TTLs and includes a lot of information in the headers. You should open the file and tweak the parameters to your particular use-case.

You can download a ready-to-run Visage distribution at the GitHub releases page. Extract it wherever, cd to the directory, and run java -jar Visage-<VERSION>-capsule.jar --distributor. Windows is unsupported. Use it at your own peril.

Renderers just need to be pointed at your RabbitMQ server, which brings us to...

A Visage renderer can be connected to an existing Visage distributor by simply editing the conf/renderer.conf file to point to the RabbitMQ server the sysadmin gives you.

You can download a ready-to-run Visage distribution at the GitHub releases page. Extract it wherever, cd to the directory, and run java -jar Visage-<VERSION>-capsule.jar. Renderer mode is the default. Windows is unsupported. Use it at your own peril.

It's possible to run a Visage without a real GPU. However, it requires a recent build of Mesa, and may not work properly.

You'll need to set the following environment variables:

• LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true
• GALLIUM_DRIVER=swr
• SWR_MSAA_MAX_COUNT=16

This forces Mesa to use the Intel OpenSWR software renderer. Currently, this is the only Mesa renderer that has the MSAA support required by Visage. Mesa's other software renderers, like llvmpipe, will not work.

Visage is open source, and as such, if you find problems, you can submit a PR to fix said problems. The code style is basically Sun conventions with tabs instead of spaces. To compile Visage, just run ./gradlew capsule. A jar containing all dependencies will be created in build/libs/Visage-<VERSION>-capsule.jar.