Pushed out a small update to my #voxel editor with improvements to saving and loading files and made the sliders a bit less frustrating to use 📦 polycube.app/release-note...

Happy Midsummer 🌞 polycube.app has a dynamic sky which can be controlled from the render view. You can move the sun across the sky and see the image update in real time ✨ #raytracing

Far enough away, even chaos looks peaceful. 🌃

ReSTIR PT, by @daqilin.bsky.social Daqi Lin, Markus Kettunen and @wymancr.bsky.social Chris Wyman: research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub... I3D'26.

ReSTIR PT Enhanced: Algorithmic Advances for Faster and More Robust ReSTIR Path Tracing | NVIDIA Real-Time Graphics Research

<p>Algorithms leveraging ReSTIR-style spatiotemporal reuse have recently proliferated, hugely increasing effective sample count for light transport in real-time ray and path tracers. Many papers have ...

research.nvidia.com

Sharing my tiny #voxel editor app that I've been working on for the past year: polycube.app It has nice-looking color sliders, three different brushes and a #raytracing renderer with a built-in denoiser ✨ Looking to keep updating it, still so many things on the to-do list! 📋

OK, just a little bit more fiddling with the #voxel raytracer. Now it incrementally denoises and accumulates each 1spp frame speeding up the accumulation once the camera is stationary. The only thing missing now is reprojection 😛 #raytracing

Write your own denoiser they said, what could possibly go wrong? 😃 Turns out, a lot of things. Spent much time pixel-peeping at a 1/4 resolution renders and found all kinds of artifacts. Luckily github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX exists and was able to find problems in my pseudo-svgf implementation.

Some kind of #voxel RGB temple.

Haven't posted about my #voxel project in a while, but I finally got around to implementing orthographic projection 🔶 #screenshotsaturday #raytracing

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...

I3D 2025 Chris Wyman's Keynote "ReSTIR: Traveling the Path of Reuse"

YouTube video by I3D Symposium

youtube.com

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

The Art Of Packing Data

The packing of data is good practice for many reasons, including disk space and efficient RAM or cache access. If we know the meaning of data we can often narrow down the range and precision, makin…

elopezr.com

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...

Demystifying multiple importance sampling

lisyarus.github.io

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