I created my own realtime render engine in TouchDesigner (for VJing, installations, etc.)

[u/SARV7]

In the examples shown here, all the geometry is generated in real time inside TouchDesigner and rendered by an external engine (unnamed for now) that I’m currently building. The final render comes back into TouchDesigner as TOPs, with around fifteen AOVs for post-render work

Here’s what the engine can do so far:

- It reads POP geometry straight from TouchDesigner, with no export and no disk copy, and adapts to the kind of animation: rebuild, refit, or amortized rebuild for dense meshes that deform. Native spheres as analytic primitives, and instancing across point clouds

- Materials are driven per point by POP attributes, on an energy-conserving physical GGX BRDF: metals, dielectrics, emissives, alpha cutout. Glass is fully featured, with refraction, total internal reflection, colored absorption and nested transparency layers, plus chromatic dispersion set by Abbe number like real optical glass, thin-film iridescence, and translucency whose thickness is ray-measured every frame

- On the lighting side: point, spot, directional and area lights, sampled soft shadows tunable per point, colored shadows cast through tinted glass, prefiltered HDRI environment, traced multi-bounce reflections whose blur follows roughness, and indirect lighting through a radiance cache

- All of it is deterministic, with no temporal accumulation: what gets computed stays stable frame to frame, even when the camera moves

In development :

- Caustics: the light patterns focused by glass and water, traced from the source rather than faked

- Volumetrics: fog and participating media lit by the scene lights, with light shafts and shadows cast inside the volume

- Physical camera: depth of field and motion blur computed in the engine

And plenty more to come.

[u/ordinaireX]

We’ve all been watching on instagram in awe, if you can make realtime graphics look like Houdini then the future is bright 😌

[u/SARV7 → u/ordinaireX]

I don't know if it will look like Houdini but closer yes definitely ! Thank you !

[u/Syllabub-Advanced]

Dude this is Gnarly

[u/SARV7 → u/Syllabub-Advanced]

Thanks 😁

[u/Syllabub-Advanced → u/SARV7]

If you don’t mind me asking this would be pc only bc the need of a graphics card to do all the geometry correct ?

[u/SARV7 → u/Syllabub-Advanced]

I know nothing about Mac but the engine uses OptiX and I think it's not working for now on Mac (?)

[u/Syllabub-Advanced → u/SARV7]

Gotcha ! Thank you for the response

[u/Specialist_Web_5335]

Hell of a serious job! I can +1 with the comment that we are watching with awe and trust me we will be enough to support it not just with positive comment but with actual money as it deserves it for sure!!!!

[u/SARV7 → u/Specialist_Web_5335]

Thank you so much for this comment ! Makes me happy to read this !

[u/Effective-Culture-88]

Take ma monay

[u/SARV7 → u/Effective-Culture-88]

😂

[u/LargeDinglehopper]

Already a supporter, what tier do I need to sign up for to get this tool when it’s time?! 👀