iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 28/02/2026

That looks amazing! I wanted to try to replicate it. This is the closest I've got so far.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 15/02/2026

For contrast, here's a naive attempt in my renderer. I'd say it clearly demonstrates how amazingly clean yours is...

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 14/02/2026

They work now! thirteen.h and tinybvh.h make for quick and easy multiplatform ray tracing (: Here's Ubuntu and macOS.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 14/02/2026

The final boss for this mini-renderer. Zorah and a (minified) Moana island. TinyBVH makes it almost too easy.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 14/02/2026

Unbelievable but true: this renderer also works with non-Sponza scenes!

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 14/02/2026

thirteen.h + tinybvh.h = easy pt

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 13/02/2026

It takes no time to use the week-end code with thirteen.h! 🤣

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 11/02/2026

It's hard to make it look good, but it's pretty easy to make it look weird... ShaderToy Wcd3W2 by Shane.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/02/2026

Live interaction: it reacts pretty quickly in a nice open scene like this.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/02/2026

Nice, it worked easily in a quick test.

Path traced scene with a shader as the sky. Shader from Xor: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3fKSzc

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 22/01/2026

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

Original: an old photo I took in the forest

3D voxelized scene in the day with volumetric fog.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 20/01/2026

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

$Path-traced render of an off-white folded fractal.$ $Path-traced render of a colorful folded fractal.$

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 16/01/2026

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

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 16/01/2026

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

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/01/2026

Detail of the final state.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 19/12/2025

Very nice. It's great to have access to the export data as well. It loads more easily in my toy renderer. I had issues with modifiers and trees in the past, but it works great with this one. Nice house!

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 12/12/2025

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

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 11/12/2025

Super nice! The interior really helps with glass materials.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/12/2025

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

Path-traced render of the Zorah gltf scene.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 22/07/2025

It's so close to perfect!

After clean up with Auto-Flip Faces, only a few normals remain inverted.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 19/07/2025

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

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 17/07/2025

Thanks for the great recommendation! I got one and it was amazing (:

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 15/07/2025

Another view of the same scene.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 15/07/2025

Another render. This one also transitions between fractal powers (squared to cubed). #fractal

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 15/07/2025

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

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 13/07/2025

Added another debug tool: explicit support for rainbows. Showing what it may look like if I ever got the physically based drops to work... This is using an explicit check on each ray for the angle against the light direction and add color to the pixel accordingly for the main and secondary arcs.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 11/07/2025

I tried a quick animation, but again it's missing a big part without the caustics. This is moving the income ray very slightly left and right.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 11/07/2025

Nice one! Those are gorgeous. Great concept. I had a go at making a similar scene - but without the nice caustic effect it's not nearly as impactful.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/07/2025

Close up on the drops to see the bounces.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/07/2025

Fly-through for better context.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 10/07/2025

Another debug scene to try and understand rainbows a little better. This is tracing the rays coming from the sun, bouncing inside "drops" (glass spheres) and reaching the eye of the lad looking up.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 09/07/2025

I also had a go at displaying LAS and PLY point clouds as spheres. They can look quite nice.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 09/07/2025

The point of precomputing was mainly for cellular automata and wave function collapse. I had some fun shapes with those.

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Lionel Lemarié @hikey.org · 09/07/2025

I have some old code that I'll dig out. It worked really well, but at the time I supported a single grid per scene. This time I'll make it a primitive so I can have many. I was using it for weird renders like this. The packing is pretty efficient: as low as 1bit per cell, or 0 if not precomputed.

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