What I’m working on right now is a Metal backend for gatling. The idea is to use metal-cpp with GLSL shaders, by forking SPIRV-cross to support ray tracing pipelines :) (very WIP)

Btw, a few weeks ago I released a small plugin for usdview. It allows inspection of UsdShade networks using a custom Qt node graph. It’s open source, lightweight and simple to install.

Small weekend experiment: ported an LCD shader from Blender to #MaterialX (originally authored by PixlFX)

Implemented USD point instancer primvar support in my toy renderer the last few days. Can now render this 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) scene with a single mesh & MaterialX material.

(Created by Oliver Markowski with Houdini, link see below ⬇️)

Lastly, implemented proper support for AOVs including those used for picking (primId, instanceId, elementId). (asset: standard shader ball) (4/4)

To reduce the memory footprint, I first run the geometry through meshoptimizer which culls and deduplicates vertices. Next, the data is compressed with blosc. The results are quite good. Decompression only happens when a BLAS is rebuilt. (3/4)

Furthermore implemented #MaterialX geompropvalues (MDL scene data), and GeomSubsets. This required quite some code rewriting, as I now store a copy of the CPU geometry data in the renderer itself. Here’s a render of stehrani3d’s MaterialEggs which make use of these features (2/4)

Made good progress with gatling lately, and one of the new features is graphical tests. They primarily run on GitHub Actions using Mesa lavapipe (supports ray tracing). Thresholds are specified as USD render settings, diff images are uploaded as artifacts (1/4)