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ThorVG
Thor Vector Graphics is an production-ready vector graphics engine designed for creating interactive apps and creative tools. It combines high performance with lightweight efficiency, as Thor embodies a dual meaning—symbolizing both immense strength and lightning-fast agility. Embracing the philosophy of simplicity leads to reliability, the ThorVG project provides intuitive, user-friendly interfaces while maintaining a compact footprint and minimal overhead.
The following primitives are supported by ThorVG:
- Lines & Shapes: rectangles, circles, and paths with coordinate control
- Filling: solid colors, linear & radial gradients, and path clipping
- Stroking: stroke width, joins, caps, dash patterns, and trimming
- Scene Management: retainable scene graph and object transformations
- Composition: various blending and masking
- Text: unicode characters with horizontal multi-line text layout using scalable fonts (TTF)
- Images: SVG, JPG, PNG, WebP, and raw bitmaps
- Effects: blur, drop shadow, fill, tint, tritone and color replacement
- Animations: Lottie
Lightweight Design
ThorVG is designed for a wide range of programs, offering adaptability for integration and use in various applications and systems. It achieves this through a single binary with selectively buildable, modular components in a building block style. This ensures both optimal size and easy maintenance.
The core library of ThorVG maintains a binary size of approximately 150KB. This is significantly smaller compared to graphics engines designed primarily for desktop environments and offers the following advantages.
- Memory Efficiency: Thanks to its low runtime memory usage, ThorVG operates stably even on low-spec systems.
- Fast Boot: The library loads and initializes quickly, improving the overall startup speed of applications.
- Low Size Deployment: With its small code and resource footprint, ThorVG is well-suited for embedded systems, IoT devices, and network-constrained environments.
Broad Portability
ThorVG is based on the C++ standard and provides consistent functionality across various platforms through an abstraction layer that minimizes dependence on specific operating systems or hardware.
- Extensive Platform Support: ThorVG supports web platforms, desktop operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux, mobile platforms including Android and iOS, as well as embedded systems like Tizen and RTOS-based environments.
- Microcontroller Support: ThorVG has been shown to run on microcontrollers like the ESP32, demonstrating its efficiency even within environments with highly limited memory and storage.
- Headless Rendering Support: ThorVG can perform rendering without a display server, enabling use cases such as server-side graphics processing or offline rendering tools.
If your program includes the main renderer, you can seamlessly utilize ThorVG APIs by transitioning drawing contexts between the main renderer and ThorVG. Throughout these API calls, ThorVG effectively serializes drawing commands among volatile paint nodes. Subsequently, it undertakes synchronous or asynchronous rendering via its render-backend engines. Additionally, ThorVG is adept at handling vector images, including formats like SVG and Lottie, and it remains adaptable for accommodating additional popular formats as needed. In the rendering process, the library may generate intermediate frame buffers for scene compositing, though only when essential. The accompanying diagram provides a concise overview of how to effectively incorporate ThorVG within your system.
CPU Rasterization
ThorVG is optimized for CPU-based rasterization, with a strong focus on vector rendering in environments where GPU resources are limited, unavailable, or intentionally avoided. In representative CPU benchmarks, ThorVG demonstrates an average of ~1.8× faster performance to a widely-used vector graphics engine across common vector rendering workloads. The advantage is particularly clear in geometry-heavy scenarios such as rectangles, strokes, rotations, and circle rendering.
Performance Overview
Test Conditions
- Tested with 5k semi-transparent primitives, including shapes, strokes, and images, using alpha blending.
- Image filtering was performed using bilinear interpolation.
- Test Platform: Apple M1 (macOS 15)
- Render size: 2560 × 1440 (2K) for each test case
- Versions: ThorVG v1.0.0, Skia v144
Threading
ThorVG incorporates a threading mechanism designed to seamlessly retrieve upcoming scenes without unnecessary delays. It utilizes a finely-tuned task scheduler based on thread pools to handle a variety of tasks, including encoding, decoding, updating, and rendering. This architecture ensures efficient use of multi-core processing.
The task scheduler is carefully designed to abstract complexity, simplify integration, and enhance user convenience. Its use is optional, allowing users to adopt it based on their specific needs.
Smart Rendering
ThorVG supports smart partial rendering, which enables more efficient rendering workflows by updating only the portions of a vector scene that have changed. By internally tracking modified regions, it minimizes unnecessary redraws and optimizes overall performance. This feature provides significant benefits in scenarios such as UI rendering, design tools, or applications where large parts of the scene remain static and only small elements update between frames. In such cases, avoiding full-scene rendering can greatly reduce computational workload and improve energy efficiency—making it particularly valuable on mobile and embedded systems.
The following figure illustrates the geometry changes and highlights the minimal redraw region (outlined in red) that needs to be updated. Only the modified area between the previous and current frames is selectively redrawn, significantly improving performance.
Please note that in highly dynamic content—such as fast-paced games or full-screen animations where nearly all objects change every frame—partial rendering provides little to no benefit and may even introduce minor overhead. In these scenarios, full-scene rendering is typically the better choice. For a practical showcase, visit this page demonstrating a performance comparison of partial rendering using ThorVG's software renderer.
Render Backends
Today, ThorVG provides its own implementation of multiple render-backend engines, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your app and system preferences.
- CPU/SIMD (Software)
- OpenGL/ES
- WebGL
- WebGPU
ThorVG is particularly ahead of the curve in the web ecosystem. WebGPU introduces next-generation graphics APIs comparable to Vulkan, offering access to compute shaders and low-overhead GPU control. This enables more aggressive optimization strategies and broader application potential. On top of this, ThorVG fully supports all of its vector rendering features within the WebGPU backend, ensuring a complete and consistent experience across platforms.
Furthermore, by abstracting underlying hardware graphics APIs such as Metal, Vulkan, and DirectX, ThorVG guarantees seamless integration across a wide range of systems, regardless of the specific hardware accelerations available.
Supported Platforms
ThorVG is designed to be portable across a wide range of devices, including small IoT devices, embedded systems, mobile platforms, game consoles, desktop environments, and the web. It is actively under development, with continuous efforts to expand support for essential platforms as needed. Currently, the major supported platforms include:
Contents
- ThorVG
Installation
This section details the steps required to configure the environment for installing ThorVG.
Build and Install
ThorVG supports meson build system. Install meson and ninja if you don't have them already.
Run meson to configure ThorVG in the thorvg root folder.
meson setup builddir
Run ninja to build & install ThorVG:
ninja -C builddir install
Regardless of the installation, all build results (symbols, executable) are generated in the builddir folder in thorvg. Some results such as examples won't be installed, you can check More examples section to see how to change it.
Note that some systems might include ThorVG package as a default component. In that case, you can skip this manual installation.
Build with Visual Studio
If you want to create Visual Studio project files, use the command --backend=vs. The resulting solution file thorvg.sln will be located in the build folder.
meson setup builddir --backend=vs
Build with Xcode
If you want to create Xcode project files, use the command --backend=xcode. The resulting solution file thorvg.xcodeproj will be located in the build folder.
meson setup builddir --backend=xcode
Quick Start
ThorVG renders vector shapes to a given canvas buffer. The following is a quick start to show you how to use the essential APIs.
First, you should initialize the ThorVG engine:
tvg::Initializer::init(4); //4 threads
Then it would be best if you prepared an empty canvas for drawing on it:
static uint32_t buffer[WIDTH * HEIGHT]; //canvas target buffer
auto canvas = tvg::SwCanvas::gen(); //generate a canvas
canvas->target(buffer, WIDTH, WIDTH, HEIGHT, tvg::ColorSpace::ARGB8888); //buffer, stride, w, h, Colorspace
Next you can draw multiple shapes on the canvas:
auto rect = tvg::Shape::gen(); //generate a shape
rect->appendRect(50, 50, 200, 200, 20, 20); //define it as a rounded rectangle (x, y, w, h, rx, ry)
rect->fill(100, 100, 100); //set its color (r, g, b)
canvas->add(rect); //add the rectangle to the canvas
auto circle = tvg::Shape::gen(); //generate a shape
circle->appendCircle(400, 400, 100, 100); //define it as a circle (cx, cy, rx, ry)
auto fill = tvg::RadialGradient::gen(); //generate a radial gradient
fill->radial(400, 400, 150, 400, 400, 0); //set the radial gradient geometry info (cx, cy, radius, fx, fy, fr)
tvg::Fill::ColorStop colorStops[2]; //gradient colors
colorStops[0] = {0.0, 255, 255, 255, 255}; //1st color values (offset, r, g, b, a)
colorStops[1] = {1.0, 0, 0, 0, 255}; //2nd color values (offset, r, g, b, a)
fill->colorStops(colorStops, 2); //set the gradient colors info
circle->fill(fill); //set the circle fill
canvas->add(circle); //add the circle to the canvas
This code generates the following result:
You can also draw you own shapes and use dashed stroking:
auto path = tvg::Shape::gen(); //generate a path
path->moveTo(199, 34); //set sequential path coordinates
path->lineTo(253, 143);
path->lineTo(374, 160);
path->lineTo(287, 244);
path->lineTo(307, 365);
path->lineTo(199, 309);
path->lineTo(97, 365);
path->lineTo(112, 245);
path->lineTo(26, 161);
path->lineTo(146, 143);
path->close();
path->fill(150, 150, 255); //path color
path->strokeWidth(3); //stroke width
path->strokeFill(0, 0, 255); //stroke color
path->strokeJoin(tvg::StrokeJoin::Round); //stroke join style
path->strokeCap(tvg::StrokeCap::Round); //stroke cap style
float pattern[2] = {10, 10}; //stroke dash pattern (line, gap)
path->strokeDash(pattern, 2); //set the stroke pattern
canvas->add(path); //add the path to the canvas
The code generates the following result:
Now begin rendering & finish it at a particular time:
canvas->draw();
canvas->sync();
Then you can acquire the rendered image from the buffer memory.
Lastly, terminate the engine after its usage:
tvg::Initializer::term();
SVG
ThorVG facilitates SVG Tiny Specification rendering via its dedicated SVG interpreter. Adhering to the SVG Tiny Specification, the implementation maintains a lightweight profile, rendering it particularly advantageous for embedded systems. While ThorVG comprehensively adheres to most of the SVG Tiny specs, certain features remain unsupported within the current framework. These include:
- Animation
- Interactivity
- Multimedia
The figure below highlights ThorVG's SVG rendering capabilities:
The following code snippet shows how to draw SVG image using ThorVG:
auto picture = tvg::Picture::gen(); //generate a picture
picture->load("tiger.svg"); //load a SVG file
canvas->add(picture); //add the picture to the canvas
The result is:
Lottie
ThorVG supports the most powerful Lottie Animation features. Lottie is an industry standard, JSON-based vector animation file format that enables seamless distribution of animations on any platform, akin to shipping static assets. These files are compact and compatible with various devices, scaling up or down without pixelation. With Lottie, you can easily create, edit, test, collaborate, and distribute animations in a user-friendly manner. For more information, please visit Lottie Animation Community' website.
ThorVG offers great flexibility in building its binary. Besides serving as a general graphics engine, it can be configured as a compact Lottie animation playback library with specific build options:
$meson setup builddir -Dloaders="lottie"
Alternatively, to support additional bitmap image formats:
$meson setup builddir -Dloaders="lottie, png, jpg, webp"
Please note that ThorVG supports Lottie Expressions by default. Lottie Expressions are small JavaScript code snippets that can be applied to animated properties in your Lottie animations, evaluating to a single value. This is an advanced feature in the Lottie specification and may impact binary size and performance, especially when targeting small devices such as MCUs. If this feature is not essential for your requirements, you can disable it using the extra build option in ThorVG:
$meson setup builddir -Dloaders="lottie" -Dextra=""
The following code snippet demonstrates how to use ThorVG to play a Lottie animation.
auto animation = tvg::Animation::gen(); //generate an animation
auto picture = animation->picture() //acquire a picture which associated with the animation.
picture->load("lottie.json"); //load a Lottie file
auto duration = animation->duration(); //figure out the animation duration time in seconds.
canvas->add(picture); //add the picture to the canvas
First, an animation and a picture are generated. The Lottie file (lottie.json) is loaded into the picture, and then the picture is added to the canvas. The animation frames are controlled using the animation object to play the Lottie animation. Also you might want to know the animation duration time to run your animation loop.
animation->frame(animation->totalFrame() * progress); //Set a current animation frame to display
canvas->update(animation->picture()); //Update the picture to be redrawn.
Let's suppose the progress variable determines the position of the animation, ranging from 0 to 1 based on the total duration time of the animation. Adjusting the progress value allows you to control the animation at the desired position. Afterwards, the canvas is updated to redraw the picture with the updated animation frame.
Please check out the ThorVG Test App to see the performance of various Lottie animations powered by ThorVG. If you're working on the frontend, you can also download the ThorVG npm package here.
In Practice
Canva iOS
Canva, is a popular visual communication platform used by millions worldwide. Known for its intuitive interface and rich design resources, Canva empowers users to create high-quality visual content easily. The iOS app switched from its previous Lottie engine to ThorVG, achieving around 80% faster rendering and 70% lower peak memory usage.
dotLottie
dotLottie is an open-source format that combines multiple Lottie animations, assets like images and fonts, and supports features such as state machines and interactivity. It uses ZIP compression (.lottie extension) for easy and efficient distribution. As a superset of Lottie, the dotLottie player now runs on ThorVG for rendering.
Espressif
Espressif Systems provides ThorVG as an official component within its ESP-IDF (IoT Development Framework), simplifying integration into ESP-IDF projects. This allows developers to easily incorporate ThorVG's rendering capabilities into their applications, particularly on IoT devices powered by Espressif’s ESP32 and ESP32-P4 microcontrollers.
Flux Audio
Flux Audio is a high-performance audio company focused on premium sound and immersive experiences. They use advanced software for consistent audio processing across devices. ThorVG powers their UI with fast, scalable vector rendering, highlighting its flexibility in modern audio platforms.
Godot
ThorVG is integrated into the Godot game engine to support sleek, high-quality vector-based user interfaces and assets. Godot is a modern, open-source game engine with a full suite of tools, allowing developers to focus on creating games without reinventing core functionality.
Lottie Creator
Lottie Creator is designed to create ultra-lightweight, highly customizable and interactive animations for web, apps and social. Supercharged with AI-based Motion Copilot. ThorVG is powering the Canvas engine behind Lottie Creator — enabling fast and scalable vector graphics rendering across platforms.
LVGL
LVGL is an open-source graphics library specifically designed for embedded systems with limited resources. It is lightweight and highly customizable, providing support for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on microcontrollers, IoT devices, and other embedded platforms. ThorVG serves as the vector drawing primitives library in the LVGL framework.
Segger
SEGGER Microcontroller provides products for developing and manufacturing embedded systems, including real-time operating systems (RTOS), middleware libraries, debugging and trace probes, and programming tools. It has adopted ThorVG as a GPU driver to enable high-performance vector rendering for its GUI apps.
TinyPiXOS
TinyPiXOS is a lightweight, open-source Linux OS that replaces X11/Wayland with a custom C/C++ graphics stack. It includes minimal window management and GUI tools, all optimized for low resource use. ThorVG handles core GUI rendering, delivering efficient performance and high visual quality in constrained environments.
Tizen
ThorVG has been integrated into the Tizen platform as the vector graphics engine. NUI is the name of Tizen UI framework which is written in C#. ThorVG is the backend engine of the NUI Vector Graphics which is used for vector primitive drawings and scalable image contents such as SVG and Lottie Animation among the Tizen applications.
Would you like us to showcase your project with ThorVG? Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request!
Interactive App
Check out Thor Janitor, an interactive demo game fully rendered using ThorVG. It renders tens of thousands of objects in real-time with effects like DropShadow and Blur, running stably at 120+ FPS!
Examples
C++ Examples
A wide range of native sample codes is available in the thorvg.example repository to help you understand and work with the ThorVG C++ APIs.
Playground
The ThorVG Playground is an interactive web-based environment where you can explore various graphic features and instantly see the results in real time.
Tools
ThorVG Viewer
ThorVG provides a resource verification tool for the ThorVG engine. The ThorVG viewer enables instant rendering directly in the web browser using the ThorVG WebAssembly binary, allowing real-time editing of vector elements. It does not upload your resources to any external server and supports exporting to formats such as GIF, ensuring that designer copyrights remain protected.
ThorVG VS Code LiveView
A Visual Studio Code extension that integrates ThorVG Viewer for previewing Lottie animations and SVG files directly inside the editor.
Lottie to GIF
ThorVG provides an executable tvg-lottie2gif converter that generates a GIF file from a Lottie file.
To use the tvg-lottie2gif, you must turn on this feature in the build option:
meson setup builddir -Dtools=lottie2gif -Dsavers=gif
To use the 'tvg-lottie2gif' converter, you need to provide the 'Lottie files' parameter. This parameter can be a file name with the '.json' extension or a directory name. It also accepts multiple files or directories separated by spaces. If a directory is specified, the converter will search for files with the '.json' extension within that directory and all its subdirectories.
Optionally, you can specify the image resolution in the 'WxH' format, with two numbers separated by an 'x' sign, following the '-r' flag.
Both flags, if provided, are applied to all of the .json files.
The usage examples of the tvg-lottie2gif:
Usage:
tvg-lottie2gif [Lottie file] or [Lottie folder] [-r resolution] [-f fps] [-b background color]
Flags:
-r set the output image resolution.
-f specifies the frames per second (fps) for the generated animation.
-b specifies the base background color (RGB in hex). If not specified, the background color will follow the original content.
Examples:
$ tvg-lottie2gif input.json
$ tvg-lottie2gif input.json -f 30
$ tvg-lottie2gif input.json -r 600x600 -f 30
$ tvg-lottie2gif lottiefolder
$ tvg-lottie2gif lottiefolder -r 600x600
$ tvg-lottie2gif lottiefolder -r 600x600 -f 30 -b fa7410
SVG to PNG
ThorVG provides an executable tvg-svg2png converter that generates a PNG file from an SVG file.
To use the tvg-svg2png, you must turn on this feature in the build option:
meson setup builddir -Dtools=svg2png
To use the 'tvg-svg2png' converter, you need to provide the 'SVG files' parameter. This parameter can be a file name with the '.svg' extension or a directory name. It also accepts multiple files or directories separated by spaces. If a directory is specified, the converter will search for files with the '.svg' extension within that directory and all its subdirectories.
Optionally, you can specify the image resolution in the 'WxH' format, with two numbers separated by an 'x' sign, following the '-r' flag.
The background color can be set with the -b flag. The bgColor parameter should be passed as a three-bytes hexadecimal value in the ffffff format. The default background is transparent.
Both flags, if provided, are applied to all of the .svg files.
The usage examples of the tvg-svg2png:
Usage:
tvg-svg2png [SVG files] [-r resolution] [-b bgColor]
Flags:
-r set the output image resolution.
-b set the output image background color.
Examples:
$ tvg-svg2png input.svg
$ tvg-svg2png input.svg -r 200x200
$ tvg-svg2png input.svg -r 200x200 -b ff00ff
$ tvg-svg2png input1.svg input2.svg -r 200x200 -b ff00ff
$ tvg-svg2png . -r 200x200
Related Projects
ThorVG is designed to be portable and extensible across various platforms. The following projects integrate ThorVG into specific environments or tools:
- ThorVG Android – Kotlin-based ThorVG support for Android.
- ThorVG Example – An example set demonstrates how to use ThorVG's APIs.
- ThorVG Flutter - A Flutter plugin for using ThorVG on Android and iOS.
- ThorVG Janitor - A demo game showcasing ThorVG’s real-time rendering features.
- ThorVG Swift - Swift bindings for rendering vector graphics with ThorVG.
- ThorVG Unity – ThorVG integration for Unity using C#.
- ThorVG Viewer - A browser-based viewer for ThorVG using WebAssembly.
- ThorVG VS Code - ThorVG VS Code Extensions.
- ThorVG Web - WebAssembly-based integration of ThorVG for web apps.
API Bindings
Our main development APIs are written in C++, but ThorVG also provides API bindings for C.
To enable CAPI binding, you need to activate this feature in the build options:
meson setup builddir -Dbindings="capi"
Documentation
The ThorVG API documentation is available at thorvg.org/apis, and can also be found directly in this repository via the C++ API and C API.
For comprehensive and well-structured technical information, please visit the DeepWiki, which offers in-depth guidance on ThorVG's architecture, features, and usage.
References
- Universal Motion Graphics across All Platforms: Unleashing Creativity with ThorVG
- Canva Enhances iOS Lottie Rendering: 80% Faster and 70% More Efficient with ThorVG
Dependencies
ThorVG provides flexible image loading capabilities, supporting both static and external loaders. This design ensures that even in environments lacking external libraries, users can rely on built-in static loaders for core functionality. At its core, the ThorVG library is fully self-contained and operates without mandatory external dependencies. However, several optional feature extensions are available, each with its own set of dependencies.
The following outlines the dependencies for these optional features:
- GL Engine: OpenGL 3.3, OpenGL ES 3.0, or a browser with WebGL2 support.
- WG Engine: webgpu-native v0.25 or a browser with WebGPU support.
- PNG Loader (external): libpng
- JPEG Loader (external): libjpeg-turbo
- WebP Loader (external): libwebp
Contributors
ThorVG stands as a purely open-source initiative. We are grateful to the individuals, organizations, and companies that have contributed to the development of the ThorVG project. The dedicated efforts of the individuals and entities listed below have enabled ThorVG to reach its current state.
Partners
Partners engage in strategic collaboration with ThorVG, working together to shape the future of scalable, high-performance vector graphics. We acknowledge organizations that have supported ThorVG’s journey through development, integration, collaboration, and community involvement.
If you’re interested in partnering with ThorVG, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at thorvg@thorvg.org
Sponsors
We sincerely thank our financial sponsors for their generous support, which drives the growth and innovation of the ThorVG project. Your contributions help us make ThorVG more powerful, efficient, and accessible for everyone.
We are also seeking your support to ensure the continued development of the ThorVG project. Your generous donations will help cover operational costs and contribute to the growth of this open-source project. Even a small contribution can make a big difference in securing the future of ThorVG!
Communication
For real-time conversations and discussions, please join us on Discord
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