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)

As usual, you can find it on GitHub: github.com/pablode/usds...

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.

Histogram Stratification for Spatio-Temporal Reservoir Sampling

Corentin Salaün, Martin Bálint, Laurent Belcour, Eric Heitz, Gurprit Singh and Karol Myszkowski

(Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany & Intel, France)

iribis.github.io/publication/...

The Pixar RenderMan team has a paper out at HPG 2025 this week about the architecture of RenderMan XPU. There's a lot of interesting details in the paper- definitely a worthwhile read!

diglib.eg.org/bitstreams/d...

Source code on GitHub: github.com/pablode/cg-a...

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

We just posted a recording of the presentation I gave at DigiPro last year on Hyperion's many-lights sampling system. It's on the long side (30 min) but hopefully interesting if you like light transport! Check it out on Disney Animation's website:

www.disneyanimation.com/publications...

Would be nice if 2DGS were to win the race. Much simpler to render 😛

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 ⬇️)

Thanks to a lot of colleagues' great work, happy to share Vulkan samples for RTX Mega Geometry. They should run on all RTX GPUs using today's new drivers

github.com/nvpro-sample...

github.com/nvpro-sample...

github.com/nvpro-sample...

github.com/nvpro-sample...

Highlighting one of the key contributions in MaterialX v1.39.2, Masuo Suzuki at NVIDIA contributed the Chiang Hair BSDF, seen below in NVIDIA RTX, which opens the door to the authoring of cross-platform, customizable hair shading models in MaterialX and OpenUSD.

github.com/AcademySoftw...

Wrote a blog post about my development process and the tools I’ve built to develop the Spark codecs:
ludicon.com/castano/blog...

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)

Hello 🦋 community!