Back at it
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Recap: I vibecoded (code unseen, no plan) a 3D editor/renderer that has a scene graph, editing controls, primitives and gizmos, materials, procedural terrain and water, and hardware-accelerated Metal raytracing with soft shadows, clouds and bounce lighting, that runs on Mac and iPad.
Tool: Codex 5.3 Medium
Time: About a day's worth of work has gone into it@stroughtonsmith With your long-time experience and know-how about Apple’s SDKs, do you think the code it generated was high quality or did you need to make a lot of manual adjustments?
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Recap: I vibecoded (code unseen, no plan) a 3D editor/renderer that has a scene graph, editing controls, primitives and gizmos, materials, procedural terrain and water, and hardware-accelerated Metal raytracing with soft shadows, clouds and bounce lighting, that runs on Mac and iPad.
Tool: Codex 5.3 Medium
Time: About a day's worth of work has gone into itI figured I needed some kind of glass shader
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@stroughtonsmith With your long-time experience and know-how about Apple’s SDKs, do you think the code it generated was high quality or did you need to make a lot of manual adjustments?
@Arcticulate the code is effectively indistinguishable from my own. I have made zero adjustments
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I figured I needed some kind of glass shader
@stroughtonsmith I guess everything is ultimately converging towards a Salvador Dali painting? I want to see liquid clocks now!
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@ankinson @stroughtonsmith And you learned something doing it.
@tsturm @stroughtonsmith Yes, of course. We had radically different goals though. Producing what Steve has in a day, even if it’s just a throw-away bit of fun, remains striking to me.
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I figured I needed some kind of glass shader
The thing about material shaders is I don't quite know the right questions to ask — the unknown unknowns. Am I taking into account the right refraction, internal reflection, attenuated shadows, etc. Why is this too bright, why is this too dark. You can tell from these examples where things are obviously wrong, and it takes quite a bit of iteration
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I figured I needed some kind of glass shader
@stroughtonsmith Water… then glass… oh I see now, all that work to recreate Liquid Glass
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The thing about material shaders is I don't quite know the right questions to ask — the unknown unknowns. Am I taking into account the right refraction, internal reflection, attenuated shadows, etc. Why is this too bright, why is this too dark. You can tell from these examples where things are obviously wrong, and it takes quite a bit of iteration
'Attenuated shadows'
A little better
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'Attenuated shadows'
A little better
Maybe I should have bought a faster Mac before trying to write a raytracer…
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Recap: I vibecoded (code unseen, no plan) a 3D editor/renderer that has a scene graph, editing controls, primitives and gizmos, materials, procedural terrain and water, and hardware-accelerated Metal raytracing with soft shadows, clouds and bounce lighting, that runs on Mac and iPad.
Tool: Codex 5.3 Medium
Time: About a day's worth of work has gone into it@stroughtonsmith I was always impressed by your skills to go from idea to PoC to shipping, but this is next level. I need my own project now to try this tech to its fullest. I work in a large enterprise where AI means Microsoft Copilot. I tried Claude on a smaller personal project and was impressed but never thought you could vibe-code a working 3D app in less than 24 hrs.
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Maybe I should have bought a faster Mac before trying to write a raytracer…
Trying not to fry my GPU with caustics, but Metal isn't happy
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Trying not to fry my GPU with caustics, but Metal isn't happy
@stroughtonsmith have you considered rendering at a smaller scale and using MetalFX to upscale? they even have a denoising upscaler now, seems like it was pretty much designed for exactly this
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Trying not to fry my GPU with caustics, but Metal isn't happy
@stroughtonsmith Say, could you make a benchmarking mode in it? I’d love to be able to speed test ML and graphics performance between my M2 Pro Mac mini against the MacBook Neo next week
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@stroughtonsmith have you considered rendering at a smaller scale and using MetalFX to upscale? they even have a denoising upscaler now, seems like it was pretty much designed for exactly this
@finnvoorhees I'm already using the metalfx denoiser after every pass, but I want to render out high res images, not just upsampled ones
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Trying not to fry my GPU with caustics, but Metal isn't happy
@stroughtonsmith Did you see Glaze from Raycast? https://www.glazeapp.com/
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@stroughtonsmith Say, could you make a benchmarking mode in it? I’d love to be able to speed test ML and graphics performance between my M2 Pro Mac mini against the MacBook Neo next week
@dgriffinjones I don't think it's stable enough for me to be able to do that. I have to baby the renderer a bit to get good results. Also I don't know yet if my performance is gated on me rather than the hardware!
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@dgriffinjones I don't think it's stable enough for me to be able to do that. I have to baby the renderer a bit to get good results. Also I don't know yet if my performance is gated on me rather than the hardware!
@stroughtonsmith Fair enough!
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Trying not to fry my GPU with caustics, but Metal isn't happy
I was sitting through hour-long renders (!) on my iPad yesterday, so I did an optimization pass on the hardware acceleration and it's much, much improved for simpler scenes, even on an M1
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I was sitting through hour-long renders (!) on my iPad yesterday, so I did an optimization pass on the hardware acceleration and it's much, much improved for simpler scenes, even on an M1
@stroughtonsmith Thank goodness this project has been years in the making or else i would be mad at the efficiency and rapid development.
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I was sitting through hour-long renders (!) on my iPad yesterday, so I did an optimization pass on the hardware acceleration and it's much, much improved for simpler scenes, even on an M1
While this raytracer may never become a finished app, there are certainly elements from it I intend to yoink for future projects — like the really neat toolbars that go around all the screen edges, they would fit into a complex pro app very nicely
