v0.45.0 · pre-release · built in the open
Lux is a real-time, node-based visual instrument for creative coding, live performance and generative art. Rust-fast, GPU-first, and honest about every pixel it draws.
What ships today
Four of the twelve subsystems already drawing real pixels. The features page has the rest.
OpenPBR, the whole stack
Metal that looks like metal, glass that refracts what actually stands behind it, lacquer over paint, velvet that catches the rim light. The full OpenPBR layered BSDF runs live, and a white-furnace test proves no photon is invented or lost.
Energy-correct under every light
Clustered Forward+
The light store holds 1,024 slots and bins them per tile, so a club rig is a patch, not a plan. Area lights have actual shapes, IES profiles read real photometry, and every shadow is budgeted so the frame never blows.
1,000 lights in 4 ms on an RTX 5070
Sky, fog, clouds, ocean
A physically based sky whose sun reddens at the horizon, fog that knows where your geometry is, traced cumulus with shadowed bases, and a Tessendorf FFT ocean. Wind 1 is a pond. Wind 18 is a storm.
The instrument
Space opens the node browser, Tab searches everything, wires snap to the pin you meant. Over 230 nodes ship documented, tooltips carry ranges and defaults, and when a node cannot draw it wears a red dot instead of pretending. The profiler is one keypress away.
230+ nodes, all documented, enforced by CIBuilt in the open
What shipped, what broke, and what got deleted on the way to 1.0, told straight. A new post lands with nearly every release.
145 posts and counting
Every Lux binary now says exactly which commit it came from. Version numbers only change when a release ships, so 'v0.44.0' was previously true of the release, of my breakfast-time build, and of yours. Now it isn't.
Read the storyA shader that will not compile, a glTF file that is not there, a pipeline the driver refuses: all of it used to happen in a terminal you were not reading, while the patch just went quiet. Now the node that failed turns red and tells you why.
Read the story
The welcome card promised an animated star. It rendered a frozen one, in the corner, forever. Every patch in Lux was checked on the way in except the ones a new artist actually opens. Now they are checked too, and they do what their cards say.
Read the storyFresh off the pipeline
Every binary now says which commit it came from. `lux --version` and the first line of your log file report `0.45.0+1073.gabc1234` instead of a bare version number that was equally true of a dozen different builds. When something breaks, the log now identifies the program that broke.
What's next
Ranked, not dated. A thing ships when it draws its first honest pixel.
Mesh, volume, spline and trail emitters. Turbulence, vortex, curl noise and flocking forces. Trails, metaballs and volume render modes. Millions of particles, all resident on the GPU. The single biggest bet on the board.
A full 3D SDF graph: fractals, Voronoi, CSG with clone, mirror and repeat, displacement. Mesh it with marching cubes or raymarch the volume directly. Today SDF lives in 2D; this is its third dimension.
One dial that swaps the renderer between Standard, Hybrid, Smart Tracer and Path Tracer with identical materials. Most of the pieces already live inside the GI orchestrator; the dial turns them from a config into a choice.
Pre-1.0 and moving fast. A new build ships with nearly every merge.