Kuafu: A Real-Time Ray Tracing Renderer

Kuafu is real-time ray tracing renderer implemented using Vulkan. Kuafu supports physically based materials (PrincipledBSDF) and various realistic light settings. The project is developed as a rendering backend for the high-performance simulator SAPIEN. It can also serve as a standalone renderer / scene builder.

The name Kuafu (夸父) is from the Chinese mythology Kuafu chasing the Sun (夸父追日).

New: Active Light Sensing Support Now Added

Kuafu now features full active light sensing support. A Demo simulating Intel RealSense D415:

Compilation

TODO

Examples

mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make kuafu_example -j && ./kuafu_example;

Features & TODOs

• Physically based materials (PrincipledBSDF / Disney PBR)

  • Diffuse
    • Diffuse texture
  • Specular
    • Specular texture
  • Roughness
    • Oren–Nayar reflectance
    • Roughness Metallic texture
    • Roughness texture
  • Transmission
    • Transmission texture
    • Refraction w/ roughness
    • Caustics
    • Align behavior with Blender
    • Beer's Law & Fresnel
  • Emission
    • Align behavior with Blender
  • Check numerical issues
  • Normals texture

• Realistic Lights

  • Directional Light (Sun / Distant)
  • Point Light
  • Spot Light
  • Active Light
  • Area Light
    • Shadow ray traced area light
  • Environment Map
    • Load from images

• Pipeline

  • Image download
    • Lazy image downloads
    • Fix validation error when downloading
  • Async rendering
  • Separate scene from Renderer
  • Depth download
  • Segmentation download
  • Offscreen rendering
  • Online shader compilation
    • (Maybe) Use libgls
  • Hide render
    • No rebuilding Blas
    • As an instance property

• Import / Export

  • Assimp scene loader
  • Embedded materials
  • Async loading
  • Load full glTF
    • Check with blender glTF
      • Note: Blender (2.93) does not export Specular, IOR and Transmission
  • Load .blend
  • Check .obj appearance with blender

• Viewer

  • Improve mouse control
  • Fix segfault / vk Exceptions when resizing in SAPIEN

Acknowledgement

This project itself is licensed under the MIT License. A large portion of code in this repository is derived from open source projects e.g. Rayex, vkCore and vk_raytracing_tutorial_KHR. Please DO NOT remove license information in the headers. We sincerely thank Christian Hilpert for their substantial work on Rayex, which is the cornerstone of this project.