Rewrote my voxel raytracing experiment to use spherical harmonics. Probes are now spawned per air voxel adjacent to a diffuse face (as opposed to per diffuse face), which simplifies probe allocation a lot and hopefully leads to easier probe LOD system in the future.

Worked on a homemade ray tracing denoiser. Ended up with something in the spirit of À-Trous wavelet and SVGF papers, which works quite well for simple, diffuse #voxel meshes. 8 spp images, before and after. Details of journey from Gaussian blur to À-Trous wavelet denoiser in thread 🧵👇 #raytracing

Added a quick and dirty VOX importer to my #voxel project. Since I recently played through Monument Valley, I checked out Ephtracy's Monument Valley files first 🏛️

The planetary sunrises and sunsets you get with the Unreal sky model are probably overkill for the #voxel renderer, but makes for nice #screenshotsaturday material 🪐

Integrated the Unreal Engine sky model into the #voxel editor. The sunsets didn't look right in the Hosek-Wilkie model (left). With the new sky model, sunsets are now exactly how I wanted them 🌅 Pardon the fireflies, I need to get proper denoising set up ✨ #raytracing

Good morning from an altitude of 40 km! Putting off other tasks in the #voxel project to work on a much nicer ray-marched sky for the ray tracer. #screenshotsaturday #raymarching #raytracing

One unexpected benefit of the color palette is storing just an offset index in the voxel. Voxels shrank from 4 bytes to a single byte. Added a simple SIMD optimization in my RLE algorithm, yielding a 6x #voxel chunk compression speed up 🏎️ #screenshotsaturday

Adding an editable color palette to the #voxel editor made it feel more like a real tool. I was finally able to actually make something in it 🤓 Perfect playground for making scenes to test #raytracing algorithms! #indiedev

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 ✨

Worth watching presentation, also provides some background info on how ReSTIR came to be and where it is heading: "ReSTIR: Traveling the Path of Reuse" www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRg9...

Realized that my bookshelf contains a #programming story 😄

More sliders in the #voxel editor UI! Added okhsl sliders alongside the regular hsl ones. The okhsl color space is much more uniform along its axes (look at the lightness slider). Björn Ottoson has a great write-up about the colorspace here: bottosson.github.io/posts/colorp...

Basics of the new #voxel UI layout implemented. Apple's RGB sliders are really nice and decided to try implementing those. #cprogramming

Tried Claude for creating interactive mockups of a #voxel editor UI and color scheme. Pretty happy with how quickly I was able to see and play around with some ideas I had. Now for the fun part, implementing it all by hand in C 🙂 #claude #anthropic

Went down a rabbit hole comparing my monolithic ray tracer to my wavefront implementation and trying to find performance improvements. Still many things I could do to improve wavefront performance, but sharing notes on progress so far. nelari.us/post/wavefro... #raytracing #rendering

I have a new article! It took a long time but I think it was worth it, hopefully you'll enjoy it too. www.elopezr.com/the-art-of-p... Many thanks to @vassilis3d.bsky.social, @mokarakaya.bsky.social‬ and @angelortiz.bsky.social‬ for the help and encouragement

A different perspective of the cornell box ✨ #voxel #raytracing #rendering

Added Russian Roulette implementation to my #voxel renderer. Didn't really appreciate before -- it doesn't make the image better, it makes it quicker to render. Left/right: vanilla and russian roulette at 16 spp. Speedup with roulette is 1.5x. Impl from github.com/boksajak/ref... #raytracing

I've been trying to wrap my head around "next event estimation" in #raytracing. What exactly is it and how does it differ from the multiple importance sampling technique, presented e.g. here? lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/m...

Continuing with #raytracing in my #voxel project. Integrated the Hosek-Wilkie sky model, with an adjustable solar radius. A really large sun disk makes it possible to test what the direct sun light contribution looks like in a simple brute-force renderer. #cprogramming

One of the nicest things about writing Metal shaders is the ability to share code between shaders and the C host program. Behold, a quick and dirty sampling distribution visualizer to check that points are correctly sampled & transformed. #raytracing #cpgrogramming

Had to work on a small bugbear, namely my #voxel project wasn't handling retina displays correctly. Before and after, the voxel grid and the text now look way better than before. Simple to implement for rendering, but the UI had to be scaled correctly. #cprogramming

Introduced a basic wavefront raytracer in my #voxel project. Even for a simple "weekend raytracer" renderer there is a performance improvement for larger bounce counts on a MacBook Air. Loosely based on: jacco.ompf2.com/2019/07/18/w... #raytracing #computergraphics

Basic raytracing up and running in my #voxel project. It's a simple monolithic GPU kernel, using the Metal #raytracing API. The method is straight from Ray Tracing in One Weekend. It's not exactly a real-time renderer, getting around ~10 FPS on an M2 chip in this scene 📽️ #computergraphics

Integrating github.com/nicbarker/clay into the #voxel project and going down a mild text rendering rabbit hole. #cprogramming

Progress on an undo-redo system. It's an unsophisticated system which takes full snapshots of the voxel grid, applying simple RLE on the data. Duration and compression ratio are visible in the inspector. #c #indiedev #voxel

The black and white editor grid got boring, so I added a darker color scheme with a gradient. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

I kept a detailed devlog on a path tracer that I implemented in #cpp using desktop #webgpu , from opening a blank window, to sampling with animated blue noise: nelari.us/post/pathtra... Detailed notes are great, I sometimes still refer to them myself. #raytracing #computergraphics

The voxel editor project continues to expand -- this time the grid expanded to a side length of 128 (I know, not yet a very impressive size...). The voxel ruler planes are now oriented to make it easier to see when zoomed out. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

Got a much nicer grid line algorithm working, which can also be easily applied to the voxel mesh itself. Based on iquilezles.org/articles/fil... with a small modification to make the lines symmetric on the voxels. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

Header include order matters! Moved all local files to the top and found a number of incorrect forward declarations and missing includes. Luckily this can all be enforced by clang-format 💆 #programming #c #cpp

Yet another voxel editor, with single voxel and box editing #voxel #indiedev

Hello, world! Here is a single cube rendered with #raytracing and blue noise 🟦