iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It's a rainy day, and I haven't done anything in a while. So, I coded some tiny transition animations on the Workbench manipulators. Low effort, kind of fun.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

So apparently ChatGPT invites people to generate 80s pictures. I wasn’t one of the cool kids, so I thought this generated alternate take was fun enough to post.

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Reposted by Max Liani

claire. @supitszaire.com · 03/09/2026

if a grid misaligns with a grid right behind, that's a moiré

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I haven’t developer much lately, too busy at work. But perhaps I could post some light reading about some of the stuff I have done in the previous year… Anyone interested in how to design a good unit testing framework? One for lightweight white-box testing (my favorite style).

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Today is that day where nothing I am doing works…

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Reposted by Max Liani

Jacco Bikker 🎦 @jbikker.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

TinyBVH has just been 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝟭.𝟴.𝟬. For CPU ray tracing, it is now the fastest option in most cases - Outperforming Intel Embree and Madmann91 for BVH build time and single-ray performance. On GPU, performance exceeds 4B rays per second - 4 rays per pixel at 4k/120Hz. github.com/jbikker/tiny...

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

People who bought SpaceX thinking what they bought is an aerospace company 🤦🏻‍♂️ What they got instead is a tiny share of xAI, and a minuscule one of aerospace sector.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Do they need to have tried and failed? To qualify, I mean… Does music education at school count? My literature teacher told me many times I will never write anything in my life. I guess the music teacher thought that too.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

That sink is every AI vibe coded application, if you review the code. Hey, it passes all unit tests though…

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Maybe I see this in rosy retrospection, but I feel that the work I did many years ago to create the Glimpse production renderer still feels to me the most insane project I ever started.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

I always had some envy about people who can read books, novels before going to sleep. If I read something I find myself immersed in, goodby sleep, I won’t be able to sleep at all.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

About 3.5 years ago I did some experiment to improve the behavior of microfacet normals at glancing angles. Many surfaces become highly reflective even though having high roughness. Check the discussion in the thread. Here is my implementation reusing equations you already have:

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Cut tool. It does more or less what you'd expect from a cut tool. Snap to points and edges, fractional placement, cut across faces, slice. No support for edge loops yet.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Add Polygon second pass: "predictive snap points" and numerical input to finetune distance and direction of the current point position in respect to previous.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I need to revamp my modeling operators, especially those that require user interaction. Here is first attempt at the Add Polygon operator. It's a first pass; it needs some work, but I feel it's not a bad start.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Alright, I made some further improvements to the tree view, which now draws in constant time (in respect to the scene complexity). Here is a test with 16 million transform nodes viewable in the scroll area. Without screen recording, the whole app renders at 8kHz.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I played a bit with the UX of interacting with the tree view. The common operations are selection and re-parent. I want to control both with the same gesture. So, if the drag&drop is mostly vertical -> reparent. If it widens to the side, it becomes marquee selection. Yes, no?

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I am not sure why I am doing this, but I optimized further the scene tree view as it was getting a bit slow and clunky to operate when I had many nodes expanded. It's not cheap, it's still the most expensive part of the program to draw.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

A long time ago in a galaxy far away (circa 2011) I came up with a distant rect light for my lighting crew. I can't remember how I did it, but I am trying to recreate it. Here is a test for the light sample distribution in the hemispherical domain.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

After how many years? I added code for distant area lights. Some call it "directional". The control "scale compensation" is meant to preserve the light power (radiant flux), so as the emissive area increases, the intensity decreases.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

I cut down startup time by deferring DLSS initialization. The first second of images rendered are noisy, until DLSS init is complete, at which point I accept a one off 40ms hiccup to allocate buffer resources and begin denoising. I'd say it's decent enough!

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

DLSS in workbench. The quality of 1spp rendering is way higher compared to the other built-in denoisers, and for half the cost. The comparison changes at higher spps.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I am trying to add DLSS-RR mode to Workbench. In theory I already have most things from the renderer, exception made for the specific pixel jitter and the motion vectors… It shouldn’t be too hard for me to add either of those. I am curios to compare DLSS with the other denoisers

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Now is when the future becomes history

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

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

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

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

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

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?

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

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?

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

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.

Screenshot of a financial simulation of an imaginary couple earning above average salaries, investing the stock market and paying down a home loan.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

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.

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

iPhone 17 pro: orange is the new black 🤣

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Reposted by Max Liani

lynn @chordbug.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

text compression

visualized zlib bit stream where the text is stretched and squashed to match the bits

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

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…

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

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

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Max Liani @maxliani.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

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).

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