Control is out on iOS now, Ray Tracing and all!

INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS finally done. gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

Behind the pretty frames of #PRAGMATA. Breaking down many tricks and hidden gems of the renderer behind CAPCOM's RE Engine. i hope you enjoy & find this few months worth of freetime article useful... mamoniem.com/behind-the-p...

My erosion filter is out! Video, blog post, and shader source. It emulates erosion without simulation, so it's fast, GPU friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks. Explainer video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4V2... Companion blog post: blog.runevision.com/2026/03/fast... #ProcGen #vfx #GameDev

The #WebGPU global illumination engine is getting somewhere, now with volumetric light shafts (00:58) and fully destructible environments. Sorry about the mouse cursor, that's how you know it's real, AI would _never_.

Got some time to spend on the pathtracer denoiser. It's getting there, and the next step is to fix those disocclusion artefacts. I will start working more and more on this project, and share more info hopefully soon! #rust #webgpu

I think most raytracing effects and denoisers don't really think about needs of fast games like shooters. For my RTGI denoiser, i put in a lot of care to get an immediately readable and stable image from the first frame after dis-occlusion. its very satisfying.

New post on how to do real-time diffuse global illumination using surfels and #WebGPU: juretriglav.si/surfel-based... #threejs

This was a fun quick experiment: Using an old photo I took in the forest, I used ml-sharp to generate gaussian splats from it, voxelized it in my toy renderer, relit the scene dramatically. #rendeting #metalrt

Switched from ImGui to SwiftUI

Coloring a fractal is interesting in itself. Finding good colors is tricky. Applying them to the "right parts" is tricky. Here's a comparison of off-white vs a value that's displaced relative to the folding for each iteration (then mapped to a color ramp). #fractals #rendering #metalrt

Ok, so I'm completely stuck trying to debug this. Left is pathtraced reference, right is my realtime renderer. Top row are metals, bottom row are dielectrics, and roughness goes from 0 to 1 left to right.

Render a fractal in 2 easy steps. 1. Render a sphere. 2. Render the rest of the... fractal. #rendering #metalrt

How to render a fractal in two easy steps: 1. Render a fractal. 2. Fold it into a fractal. #rendering #metalrt

Fractal mitosis 4. #metalrt #rendering

Fractal mitosis 3. #metalrt #rendering

Fractal mitosis 2. #metalrt #rendering

Fractal mitosis. #metalrt #rendering

New blog post! (yep, at New Year's Eve.) A short detour into a fun one-liner shading model I use for clouds in my game 🥰 lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/a...

New post! "Realtime Raytracing in Bevy 0.18 (Solari)" jms55.github.io/posts/2025-1...

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

Cem Yuksel's update to the teapot model looks great with a glass material! #metalrt #rendering

A modernized Utah Teapot model with interior! You can see/customize/download it, along with historical versions on the official teapot page: graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/

After nine years of development, meshoptimizer has reached its first major version, 1.0! This release focuses on improvements in clusterization and simplification as well as stabilization. Here's a release announcement with more details on past, present and future; please RT! meshoptimizer.org/v1

Naive attempt at loading the Zorah scene. Uses 200GB of RAM. With enough swap and patience, who needs optimization?.. #metalrt #rendering

Zorah looks like a nice level-up if you've conquered the classic Swallowing the Elephant challenge! (pharr.org/matt/blog/20...)

Some images showing off my improvements to my photon mapper I have integrated into truetrace The photon mapper is up on the Dev branch on the github

My latest coding adventure is now up on YT -- some experiments with ray-tracing glass and water, and the cool caustics they can cause youtu.be/wA1KVZ1eOuA?...

Experimenting with a face extrusion and retraction brush in my toy #voxel editor. Threw a bit of #raytracing in there while I was at it ✨

Got an MRI so I played with some renders of the inside of my melon. #metalrt #rendering

Morphing fractal shapes. This is a Julia fractal with a linear interpolation of the distance function between iteration counts. Starts by interpolating between 1 and 3 iterations, then 3 and 5, etc... The material also changes for no particular reason... #metalrt #rendering #fractal

New on Metal by Example: Getting Started with Metal 4, a breezy introduction to the fundamental changes arriving in the Metal API later this year: metalbyexample.com/metal-4/

🧵 Attempting to render a rainbow simply by path tracing millions of rain drops. It's not working well yet... Starting by looking closely at a drop and going through the color spectrum, we can see the diffraction at play: the refracted scene appears to move due to the changing ior.

Fractal SDF rendered as voxel spheres. The high resolution one has close to 1 billion spheres. #metalrt #rendering

Fractals, in situ. #metalrt #rendering #FractalFriday

Fractals, in situ. #metalrt #rendering #FractalFriday

@jbakergraphics.bsky.social has an amazing collection of fractal distance estimators! jbaker.graphics/writings/DEC... All the authors are listed on the page. There are some gems in there! #metalrt #rendering

Renders of an old scene by Maximilian Tarpini. Makes for a fun light study. #metalrt #rendering

I got a pico-mac-nano! Such a cool little device. The 1.5" screen looks awesome. When I was a kid playing on my parents' Mac Plus and read that computers could one day fit in your pocket - *this* is what I imagined it would look like. blog.1bitrainbow.com/pico-mac-nano/

Quick test of participating medium - simplest possible: on primary rays, N% chance of bouncing in a random direction at an arbitrary point between the origin and the intersection. Not a bad result, but I'm disappointed not to see better refracted light trails under the sphere. #metalrt #rendering

Gotta love the amount of detail available in the OSM maps. #metalrt #rendering

Nice little palate cleanser for my mind: easy renders of a few landmarks using OSM data. Some of these are 100M triangles. Plenty of detail in there. #metalrt #rendering

The photon debugging view is working pretty well now. I can navigate the scene to look at the paths, bounces and final photon positions - along with a preview of their impact on the scene. #metalrt #rendering

Here's an idea: shoot some photons and add them to the scene as actual emissive spheres to illuminate it. Couple of drawbacks: it's very slow and it's not very effective. #metalrt #rendering

Want to do a quick photon mapping test, but it's a slow start because I spent most of the time so far playing with the debug rays instead. It does immediately show that the basic GPU hash rand I used is no good. #metalrt #rendering

1/15) 🧵 Breaking down a quick experiment: Simple but slow displacement for ray-traced triangles #MetalRT #rendering Top-left: Typical path-tracer with a simple triangle-based model. Other three: Same model input, with increasing displacement added while tracing the rays.

Quick experiment: Instead of adding each triangle to the BVH, how about adding a bbox for each one and raymarching the triangle inside? It's very very slow, but allows for some fun displacement.

"Self portrait" that looks nothing like me, as a test of a simple subsurface scattering implementation. I was aiming for the classic marble look, but there's plenty of room for improvement... #metalrt #rendering

Halvorsen attractor in Sponza. #metalrt #rendering

Halvorsen attractor. #metalrt #rendering