Portfolio

Sculptor

Sculptor is a custom Vulkan renderer built from scratch for real-time graphics experimentation and prototyping It focuses on modern lighting, ray tracing, volumetrics, GPU-driven rendering, denoisers, and post-processing.

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Core pillars

Lighting ReSTIR GI, ReSTIR DI, ray traced shadows, AO, DDGI, IES profiles, SHaRC integration.

Volumetrics Physically based atmosphere, large-scale volumetric fog, volumetric clouds, aerial perspective.

Scene rendering GPU-driven pipeline, two-pass occlusion culling with hierarchical culling (instance, meshlet, triangle), visibility buffer

Post processing Localized tonemapping, auto exposure, white balance, purkinje filter, bloom, lens flares.

Feature spotlights

Real-time global illumination

Both diffuse and specular GI are handled in real time, with a workflow centered around ReSTIR GI and variable rate tracing. DDGI acts as a lighting cache and also feeds volumetric effects.

• Fully dynamic with no baking requirement.
• Integrated with clouds and atmosphere.
• Supports both diffuse and specular transport.

Denoisers and ray tracing stability

Engine includes custom denoisers for indirect diffuse and specular lighting, plus dedicated denoising paths for ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion.

• Diffuse and specular denoise based on Nvidia RELAX.
• Shadow and AO denoise inspired by AMD FidelityFX Denoiser.

Volumetric fog and atmosphere

The engine renders large-scale volumetric fog and atmosphere with lighting-aware behavior, designed to hold up both near the camera and at far distances.

• Frustum-aligned voxel structure for volumetric fog.
• Coverage from local detail up to long-distance views.
• Grounded in techniques inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2 and Far Cry 6 talks.

Custom graphics capture tool

Beyond rendering features, Sculptor includes in-engine debugging tools for inspecting passes and validating frame data while iterating on techniques.

• Captures outputs from rendering passes automatically.
• Supports live inspection of textures from any pass.
• Includes special visualizations for NaNs, integers, and histograms.

Gallery