Now is when the future becomes history

Last weekend I refined the scene tree view in Workbench. I used the drag & drop support in dear imgui to implement DAG reordering and reparenting, plus renaming. Custom behavior and drop region draw to show where the node would be inserted, and display where and why it cannot.

100,000 fuzz iterations. I'd say this part of the system works :)

Oh boy, I am letting Cursor run automated mutation testing in Workbench... 🍿

I have just spent 7 hours straight, barely leaving my desk looking at the wrong problem. I thought I was lost in reindexing hell, but the complex data structure I just made works just fine, the problem was in the incomplete input data all along. How is your day?

Finally, I came around at implementing DOF and wiring it to the camera manipulator system. Click and drag to samples the scene to estimate the focus distance, while scroll to modulate the aperture.

As we speak about unit testing, this is an example of what my unit tests look like. In particular the assertion messages are AI autocompletions. So, I didn't have to type much. Personally, I find this much more appealing than what I get with macro-based systems.

Friends out there. I have a question related to the use of unit test frameworks. Most frameworks for C/C++ are macros based. Do you like using macros for the purpose? Or do you think macros make your life harder, you wish for another way?

Eventually I did a good cleanup on my unit testing framework. I added support for JUnit xml export (in case I ever want to setup a CI process, even though it would be nonsense for a personal project 😅). But the cool thing is that it produces a complete log and xml export even in case of crash.

Crossed off the procrastination list: added support for multiple cameras in the scene. Up to now, I couldn't create cameras from the GUI, couldn't select them for rendering either. It's funny how something like this takes 20 minutes to do but can stay on the list for years.

I am back to it. I decided to revamp my modeling operators to carve out a half a decent modeler. There is a lot of cool manipulators options to be explored there. I started on chamfer... clearly, it's going to take a while to get it right.

I am a social person, I love more working shoulder to shoulder and exchange ideas throughout the day than the reality that I work from home, isolated by time zones. The most unexpected thing to me about AI tools, such as Cursor, is the positive impact on this.

Earlier this year I spent a few weekends toying around the math of simulating finance and investments. The only way for me to understand was to write a program that would put the concept into practice. So, I have implemented a Montecarlo simulator that projects family finances.

OMG! My iPhone just updated to the new version with the “Liquid Glass” design. OMG, what were they thinking????????? Of course I saw some of it when it was announced, and I was skeptical… but I didn’t realize it was this bad.

I reopened my project for the first time in 6 months... I barely remember which side is up. I told myself, "Do the first thing that cross your mind": If there is geometry under a light, and its cameraGain is set to zero, the light and the geometry become invisible to camera rays.

Over the month of October, my solar array produced 1.5 MWh, I used 915 kWh to power the house and charge my car. I drew only 3.7 kWh from the grid, exported back 570 kWh.

Unfortunately, modern rendering (i.e. path tracing, software rasterization, etc…) looks more like pure compute than traditional “graphics”, and implementing such complicated data structures and computation using graphics API feels exactly like GPU computing before CUDA.

iPhone 17 pro: orange is the new black 🤣

text compression

You remember you made a mistake, so you want avoid doing it again! Just this time you don’t recall exactly what you did wrong, so you end up messing up at the opposite end…

First rather naive implementation of Stochastic Light Cuts. Here comparing uniform sampling vs SLC with 1spp over 16,000 lights.

It’s been a long break away from my projects. Work deadlines + sickness + low energy slow recovery… I think I’ll try to make some progress on light transport, at least for a bit. Workbench doesn’t handle many lights (not gracefully at least).

Histogram Stratification for Spatio-Temporal Reservoir Sampling Corentin Salaün, Martin Bálint, Laurent Belcour, Eric Heitz, Gurprit Singh and Karol Myszkowski (Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany & Intel, France) iribis.github.io/publication/...

I really, really, really dislike year-based software version numbers.

The Vulkan porting is complete 🎉 The last missing piece was the primordial raster renderer, which I am not sure why I keep around :) All in all, it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

The amount how pieces to track to share a texture between Vulkan and CUDA feels a bit over the top. Each of these need to be constructed and destroyed, otherwise GPU memory leaks... I wish we just had pointers and that's it.

Components selection and editing work again.

And boooom....

I am doing things I a rush lately… Hopefully a better structure will emerge from the mess and a rewrite will follow.

Some progress: the grid, selection, wireframe, light gizmos, reverse Z-buffer, path-tracer/raster compositing and a few more bits. It's all coming back together.

And... it's upside down 🤣

It's still a mess, but bit progress today, UI fully working. With an empty scene the program renders at 12kHz, which is ridiculous! This compared to 4kHz of the OpenGL implementation. To get there I had to hack through GLFW and dear imgui docking where some "expensive" windows system calls were made

Why is this texture taking so long to upload… I don’t get it… it’s just a 1k texture… Looking closer: size_t k_resolution = 1024; size_t k_channels = 1024; size_t size = k_resolution* k_resolution * k_channels; I shouldn’t write code past 8pm…

Small progress today: my GUI library system is partially working. Textures and picking are still missing though.

Our #GDC25 talk on RTX Mega Geometry and how it was used in UE5 and Alan Wake 2 is now available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kblm...

The easy part of porting to VK the imgui-based portion of Workbench UI is done. Now to the hard part...

Rainbow cubes are back! It's likely most of you didn't know me when all my posts were rainbow cubes... As I am preparing to port Workbench to VK, I am back to basics.

What do you do on Easter break? ... f***

Also, this! The whole GUI draws at a ridiculous 4200 fps.

It's hard to find time and energy to work on my project lately. I haven't written a single line of code for it in months... But today I have upgraded my workstation from an old Intel 10th gen i9 to a Ryzen 9950X and how boy!.. If you thought Workbench opened quickly, wait until you see this:

My thoughts on Generative AI

When companies were increasing prices by 20-30%, blaming it on 5% inflation… how much do you think they’ll rise prices blaming it on 20-30% tariffs? Just asking for a friend.

Trying hard not to think about what is happening… the level of stupidity is hard to comprehend.

Recently I saw I video of the Boston Dynamics’ Atlas walking and running very smoothly and convincingly human. But, fluid motion is the result of what is energy efficient given weight distribution in the body. I wonder if making a humanoid robot moving like a human is energy efficient.

I have another take on “Vibe Coding”, and it doesn’t involve gen AI: Spend time coding on a project you enjoy, following a coding methodology and style that reflects you, experimenting on things you like, without overbearing process. That, is vibe.

First meeting 7:30am, last email 9:38pm

On closed source projects, code reviews shouldn’t be about correctness, they should be about conformance: is the new code dumb? Does it violate any design guideline? Is it documented? We are bad at spotting bugs by reading code. For that we should rely on tests, tools and benchmarks.

Model of cosmic time to scale youtu.be/nOVvEbH2GC0?...

I just realized that Apple AirPods Pro have a little known frequency calibration feature! Our ears begin to drop sensitivity to high end of the frequency spectrum as early as 8 years of age and it slowly and progressively degrades from there.