iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Continuing the "low-fidelity #voxel global illumination" experiment with blocky spatially hashed path-traced lighting ✨ Implemented a small wavefront path tracer based on jacco.ompf2.com/2019/07/18/w... on top of the axis-aligned distance fields.

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Added Halton sampling to the voxel renderer. Yielded a nice improvement in #voxel AO clarity 🎉 The method is loosely based on the code in github.com/mmp/pbrt-v4.

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"Low-fidelity global illumination" #voxel rendering. Combines raymarching with axis-aligned distance fields and spatially hashed ray-traced ambient occlusion. The unfiltered blocky look from spatial hashing kinda works in a voxel scene!

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

While investigating #voxel rendering alternatives that don't involve generating triangles, I ran into the "Voxel GI with Nested Axis-Aligned Distance Fields" paper. github.com/cg-tuwien/NA... Super promising method, with adapted code, I can render RTAO with 1 billion voxels on an M2 Macbook Air!

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Published another update for my #voxel editor 📦 The face brush now tracks the mouse a lot better when extruding 😌 polycube.app/release-note...

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

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...

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

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

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Reposted by Nelarius

Mari @madmaraca.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Far enough away, even chaos looks peaceful. 🌃

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

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! 📋

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

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.

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

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

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Nikita Lisitsa @lisyarus.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

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.

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

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 🏛️

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

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 🪐

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

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 ✨

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

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...

youtube.com

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

YouTube video by I3D Symposium

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Realized that my bookshelf contains a #programming story 😄

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

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...

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Basics of the new #voxel UI layout implemented. Apple's RGB sliders are really nice and decided to try implementing those. #cprogramming

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

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

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Emilio López @redorav.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

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

elopezr.com

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…

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

A different perspective of the cornell box ✨ #voxel #raytracing #rendering

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

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...

lisyarus.github.io

Demystifying multiple importance sampling

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

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

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Had to work on a small bugbear, namely my #voxel project wasn't handling retina displays correctly. Before and after, the voxel grid and the text now look way better than before. Simple to implement for rendering, but the UI had to be scaled correctly. #cprogramming

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Introduced a basic wavefront raytracer in my #voxel project. Even for a simple "weekend raytracer" renderer there is a performance improvement for larger bounce counts on a MacBook Air. Loosely based on: jacco.ompf2.com/2019/07/18/w... #raytracing #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Basic raytracing up and running in my #voxel project. It's a simple monolithic GPU kernel, using the Metal #raytracing API. The method is straight from Ray Tracing in One Weekend. It's not exactly a real-time renderer, getting around ~10 FPS on an M2 chip in this scene 📽️ #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Integrating github.com/nicbarker/clay into the #voxel project and going down a mild text rendering rabbit hole. #cprogramming

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Progress on an undo-redo system. It's an unsophisticated system which takes full snapshots of the voxel grid, applying simple RLE on the data. Duration and compression ratio are visible in the inspector. #c #indiedev #voxel

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

The black and white editor grid got boring, so I added a darker color scheme with a gradient. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I kept a detailed devlog on a path tracer that I implemented in #cpp using desktop #webgpu , from opening a blank window, to sampling with animated blue noise: nelari.us/post/pathtra... Detailed notes are great, I sometimes still refer to them myself. #raytracing #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

The voxel editor project continues to expand -- this time the grid expanded to a side length of 128 (I know, not yet a very impressive size...). The voxel ruler planes are now oriented to make it easier to see when zoomed out. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Got a much nicer grid line algorithm working, which can also be easily applied to the voxel mesh itself. Based on iquilezles.org/articles/fil... with a small modification to make the lines symmetric on the voxels. #voxel #indiedev #computergraphics

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Header include order matters! Moved all local files to the top and found a number of incorrect forward declarations and missing includes. Luckily this can all be enforced by clang-format 💆 #programming #c #cpp

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Yet another voxel editor, with single voxel and box editing #voxel #indiedev

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Nelarius @nelarius.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Hello, world! Here is a single cube rendered with #raytracing and blue noise 🟦

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