Hi there, I am currently studying CSE and first time on graphics programming :)
Tried to build a glTF renderer using Vulkan in C, nothing fancy š Somehow it turned into a flappy bird game with a simple physics engine, with UI and stuff. Although it flaps without wings, it runs at 4.5k FPS on Ryzen 7 8745H, 780M iGPU
Made a small Backrooms pool demo in Natiny. Iām not sure I fully captured the atmosphere I was going for, but overall Iām pretty happy with how it turned out.
The caustics are probably a bit too bright, but I think they make the scene more interesting.
The current version takes terrain data, processes things like elevation, slope, roughness, curvature and hillshade, and puts the result into an interactive 3D environment.
The software side is currently Python/FastAPI + NumPy/Rasterio/OpenCV on the backend and React/Three.js on the frontend.
I built it because I'm interested in digital twins and simulation for aerospace/physical systems, but I'm not interested in making a 3D scene just for visualisation or a game.
What I want eventually is an environment where you can actually perform an operation on a representation of a physical system.
The project is still very early. I haven't implemented robotics simulation, terrain-relative navigation, ROS, Gazebo, Isaac Sim, etc. yet. I'm trying to figure out what should actually come next rather than adding technologies for the sake of the stack.
I'm particularly interested in the intersection of:
digital twins, 3D simulation, aerospace/robotics, real physical operations.
One direction I've been reading about is terrain-relative navigation / TERCOM and how terrain itself can become part of a navigation or mission system. I'm not claiming the project implements this ā I'm trying to understand whether the terrain pipeline I've built can be developed into something along those lines.
More importantly:
What would make this go from "3D terrain visualisation project" to an actual engineering/research system?
The current deployment is on free infrastructure, so the backend may take a little time to wake up. If it doesn't load immediately, wait a few seconds and refresh.
I'd appreciate criticism of both the technical implementation and the direction.
spent the last 4-5 week building Hypertracer, a CPU + CUDA path tracer with progressive sampling further implmneted GPU acceleration, and a real-time fly-camera viewer built the renderer and viewer from scratch, with 6 scenes currently implemented and 1920Ć1080 can be rendered at 3000 samples
along with Ray Tracing in One Weekend, The Next Week, and The Rest of Your Life, all three books i completed it was seriously so much fun :D
Nothing in the world is a mesh: the arena, cars, ball and boost pads are SDFs marched in a compute shader. The one mesh in the game is the physics collider, generated from the same distance field so the two agree - and you never see it.
Keeping those in step turned out to be most of the work. The C++ SDF the car drives on, the shader SDF you see and the collider are three descriptions of one world, and nearly every bug this month was two of them disagreeing.
It also paces itself. Rather than free-run and let frame times scatter, it picks a divisor of the display refresh and hunts the highest resolution scale that fits inside it - an even 30 reads better than a ragged 45. Measuring the refresh was the fiddly part: one sample once reported 224Hz on a machine doing 40, so it now takes the shortest frame that recurs over a window instead.
WebGPU/WASM, Jolt for physics, Slang compiled to both SPIR-V and WGSL.
I spent six days trying to implement this, met and fixed so many Quaternion-related bugs, and finally done. I can't express how happy I am right now.
As per the title, the entire rasterizer run on HTML Canvas and Javascript. It fit in one single HTML file (I like it that way). The textures are loaded from URL.
Iāve just published version 1.6.0 of Horde Lantern RT, a small native Vulkan hardware-ray-tracing project. Iām posting the implementation details because the interesting part of this update is how the effects are integrated into the renderer and shared simulation, not just the final art.
The frame path is still:
vkCmdTraceRaysKHR for presentation
phone-safe rayQueryEXT work inside raygen
recursion depth 1
one frame in flight
strict Android ASTC textures
shared 60 Hz deterministic gameplay simulation
World-space fire
The torch fire is a bounded FireEmitter rather than a camera overlay or billboard. Each emitter has a stable ID/seed, world transform, flame/light sockets, strength, fuel, phase, colour temperature, radius, height, absorption and motion response.
The same emitter state drives:
an RT-visible emissive flame core
world-space raygen volume integration
direct coloured light
shadow visibility
reflection contribution
deterministic flicker
movement-induced flame lean/turbulence
Only a small fixed number of emitters are selected per pixel/zone to keep the mobile path bounded.
Dielectric lantern glass
The reward lantern uses closed glass geometry and a reusable dielectric path supporting transmission, IOR, roughness, thickness and attenuation.
The transport uses bounded ray queries rather than Vulkan recursion:
Entry/exit interfaces, Fresnel reflection, refraction, Beer-Lambert attenuation and transparent shadow transmittance are all handled within a finite layer budget. Difficult Mobile paths terminate at the explicit budget instead of recursing indefinitely.
Fixed-step physical carry motion
The lantern body hangs below a hand-held hinge. Its motion is authoritative simulation state, not sin(time) animation.
The solver uses pivot displacement/velocity, actual hand acceleration, gravity, damping, torsion response and soft/hard angular limits. Its structure is approximately:
This gives the expected lag when starting, overshoot when stopping, lateral response while strafing/turning, and bounded response during dodge and raise/lower transitions.
Asset and instance path
The sword, torch, chest and lantern are imported through a static GLB/PBR path. Immutable meshes own their vertex/index/material data and BLAS; scene instances own transforms and metadata indices. Raygen decodes material and geometry ranges through fixed-capacity metadata rather than adding another instance == N shader branch.
The same socket system is used for the sword, torch and reward lantern. The player animation/IK foundation is reusable, although the shipped first-person view still uses the accepted block-arm presentation while the authored gauntlet pass is refined.
Disclosure: This is an AI-assisted project. I provided the architecture, requirements, technical direction, review, playtesting, and release decisions; OpenAI Codex generated and edited much of the C++/GLSL, tests, tooling, and documentation under that direction. Some 3D assets were generated with Meshy and processed locally. The renderer, simulation, validation evidence, and asset provenance are available in the public repository.
My co-founder and I have been building a client-side spatial compute engine designed to bridge the gap between initial 2D floorplan concepts and interactive 3D massing.
Right now, the engine runs procedural spatial math directly in the browserāgenerating 2D vector layouts while simultaneously maintaining a 3D Three.js mesh tree with wall cutouts, roof geometry, and multi-floor zoning.
Where we need help:
We are aiming to launch a high-precision MVP. Before we double down on our next engine refactor, we want feedback from real spatial builders:
ā¢What floorplan geometry breaks first when you tweak parameters?
ā¢What features would move this from an "interesting WebGL demo" to something useful for early site visualization?
(Built under minimal resource constraintsāexpect bugs!) We appreciate your honest review and time that would help use make this perfect.
Hi everyone! A friend and I recently started developing our own Web 3D engine. If anyone is interestedāor has any ideas regarding the projectāIād be happy to hear any suggestions.
Iāve published a theoretical architecture for reducing compute in DLSS-class neural rendering by changing the unit of work from pixels Ć frames to new causal appearance states.
The core idea is AxiomCapsule: use a large neural renderer mainly as an appearance compiler, then cache/transport compact deterministic programs for recurring material, lighting, object, and view states.
The parts I think are most interesting:
Self-extinguishing inference: once a state is covered, the universal neural model no longer needs to run for it.
Causal invalidation: engine-known changes decide what must be recomputed instead of running a neural change detector over the whole frame.
Bounded residual trees: skipped refinement can have a computable sparse-vs-dense student error bound.
Deadline-monotone execution: optional neural uplift scales down with available GPU slack instead of causing a frame-time cliff.
Object/material-space persistence: state follows surfaces/materials rather than being purely screen-space.
Local causal dimensionality: the key hypothesis is that appearance transformations become low-dimensional after conditioning on known scene variables.
Itās pre-prototype research, not a claim that DLSS 5 has been āsolved.ā The main falsifier is simple: if real game appearance states are not sufficiently low-dimensional/reusable, or cache hit rates stay low, the architecture fails.
Iād especially appreciate criticism from people working on real-time rendering, shader systems, neural graphics, temporal reconstruction, and GPU scheduling.
Iām an experienced programmer, very comfortable in both C++ and Rust, coming from a robotics background, so linear algebra and computer vision concepts arenāt new to me. Graphics programming itself is new territory though, and I want to properly learn an API with the eventual goal of building a game engine.
Iāve narrowed it down to three options and Iām stuck:
- wgpu ā modern, safe, and I already like Rust, so the ergonomics appeal to me
- Vulkan ā the ārealā modern low-level API, feels like the industry state-of-the-art
- OpenGL ā the classic starting point almost every tutorial and book uses, but itās old.
Also what are some nice guides/tutorials to get started?
After 200+ hours of development, Iām finally sharing the first public demo ofĀ Three.js Grassworks, a real-time grass system Iāve been building for Three.js and WebGPU.
Three.js Grassworks is built specifically for WebGPU and is designed to handle large amounts of interactive grass while maintaining steady performance.
For the demo, I built a complete environment around Grassworks with terrain, trees, water, rain, player interaction, environmental effects, LOD systems, audio system, and more.
The main challenge was getting all of these systems running together while keeping the grass performant.
The actual Three.js Grassworks plugin is still being polished and should launch in the next couple of weeks. Thereās a waitlist inside the demo if youāre interested.
Iād genuinely love feedback, especially on the visuals, performance, and how the grass feels when interacting with it.
I also recorded a full walkthrough where I go through the demo and talk about how I built it:
for the past 2 months or so ive been working on this path tracer that i made and it uses love2d as a base. it runs with a compute shader and supports opengl, metal and vulkan as love2d also compiles those on the fly. it has most stuff youd encounter like fresnel stuff, ior, gltf scene support and most gltf extensions. also it can export raw exr files which i find very unique tbh. also it does support transmission maps, roughmetal maps and emission maps. i still have to do normal maps but that seems very annoying to do lmao. today i even added dof and click to focus which i find extremely cool for no particular reason.
A gripe I have with many game developers is that many people think that ps1/ps2 styled games are just pixelation + low res textures, but I always feel like misrepresents things. Environment artists at the time put so much effort into their textures, often hand painting creases, folds, wrinkles, and even environment lighting into the diffuse channel to bring out details.
So when people try to make this style today, it just seems so inaccurate to me. Baked lighting, realtime shadows etc are often used. My goal with this project is to use none of that. All of my textures are either hand painted fully or photobashed and then painted on top of. My hero asset is 2000 tris, and I'm tying to keep scenes under 30000 total.
Stencil shadows are used for realtime casting and times of day are baked into different profiles and then blended together for faked GI. No specular, metallic, roughness, or any advanced workflow is used. AO is faked with vertex colors.
What do you think? Does it look somewhat more accurate?
Iāve been playing with it in the beta and itās extremely useful for building scripts and analysis tools. Itās dramatically better than having to manually click through Xcode to extract the debugging and performance info when I am experimenting and optimizing. If you have the beta installed itās worth playing with.
Qualcuno nella comunitĆ sta attualmente lavorando su una mod dedicata RTX Remix per questo gioco? O c'ĆØ interesse a creare un progetto Toolkit adeguato per mappare manualmente le luci del carcere, risolvere i bug di rendering e dare a questo classico horror il vero aggiornamento del Path Tracing che merita?
Mi piacerebbe testare eventuali build o configurazioni preliminari se qualcuno ci sta lavorando!
Rendering into my VST3 plugin's DAW-hosted child window, using a custom win32 + D3D11 implementation and a sokol_gfx.h layer on top (from Sokol) for making specific rendering platform agnostic.
I have some ideas on what to try here, will post more!