Graphi.hx ✨🪩🔭

Pronounced grae:fi/h/ks, alternatively Grafikha -- a nod to either Haxe language or Kha graphics backend or whatever.

A hobby ray tracer from scratch in Haxe using Kha as a low-level graphics API (for vector maths and putting pixels on the screen).

• The initial goal was an obscure minimal business card-style implementation, but with more features added and for better flexibility some modularization became necessary.

• Supports either .nff (view frustum, spheres, triangles and lights only) or .obj format input. I am not aiming, at any point, to support the complete zoo of nff primitives so it's gonna be either universal triangles or some interesting smooth surfaces.

• Interactive, qweasd moves/rotates camera around the focal point. Plan to support on the fly nff input, think it'll be cool.

• Rendering: diffuse and specular shading (read: hard shadows and simple highlights), raytraced reflections and at this point somewhat broken refraction/transparency. Plan to rework it as a modular pipeline allowing to turn stages on/off change parameters such as bounce count, etc. on the fly.

• Planning some optimizations with compute shaders and perhaps adaptive resolution scaling/sampling rate (there is none as of now), also perhaps log frame times [Giga]rays per-pixel, etc.

• Stretch goals: some depth of field and motion blur would be sweet.

• No plans whatsoever of making it into usable game engine or anything like that. Intend to perform zero modeling as well.

Roadmap:

• Restore existing features (triangles, obj format, camera movement)

• Figure out Electron HTML5 target in Atom

• Interface: Interactive manipulation of render parameters (also read from nff)

  • mouse dragging input values

• Interface: input model file from command line; log info to window title

• Feature: Refraction

• Feature: sampled/temporal AA

• Optimization: adaptive resolution/caching

  • multithreading or round robin

• Optimization: Offload ray calculations onto compute shaders

• Optimization: Rasterized visibility

• Optimization: further modularization

Plan

• electron security flag
• proper electron installation
• decouple from dconsole via events
• Issue: dcmonitor won't open on native (shift+tab)
• adaptive render sampling [x] recover obj / triangles
• dconsole in separate thread (where available)

Updated workflow:

• subscribe for refresh only when scene params change
• each render pass take constant time, each time evaluating a sample of rays - cached between updates
  • displayed at low res
• when rendered at target resolution, stop
• render sampler should be automatically reflected in preview
• on close save image off backbuffer
• replace backbuffer with g2.Image