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)

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

• Realistic Lights

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

• Pipeline

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

• Import / Export

  • [x] Assimp scene loader
  • [ ] Embedded materials
  • [ ] Async loading
  • [x] Load full glTF
    • [x] 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.