Ray Tracing Integration for Makie Visualization: GPU-Based Photorealistic Rendering Pipeline
By
simondanisch
Master baker tier. Every paragraph earns its place on the tray.
Summary
The article announces RayMakie and Hikari, a physically-based GPU ray tracing pipeline integrated into the Makie visualization ecosystem. This new technology enables any Makie scene to be rendered with photorealistic path tracing by simply swapping out the backend, providing features like global illumination, volumetric media, spectral rendering, and physically-based materials running on the GPU. The tools are not yet fully released but will be available in the coming weeks, with demo scenes and showcase scripts already accessible on GitHub.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWe're excited to announce RayMakie and Hikari, a physically-based GPU ray tracing pipeline integrated directly into Makie.
Any Makie scene can now be rendered with photorealistic path tracing: just swap out the backend and get global illumination, volumetric media, spectral rendering, and physically-based materials, all running on the GPU.
All showcase scripts and demo scenes from this post are available at github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo.
Note: RayMakie, Hikari, and Raycore are not fully released yet — we plan to publish official releases in the coming weeks.
We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing.
Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia.
Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon.
Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072444
Points: 10
# Comments: 2
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