Devlog · Lux

Built in the open

The devlog

145 posts of what shipped, what broke, and what got deleted on the way to 1.0. Numbered in order; start anywhere.

The Helmet Was Fine, Actually

glTF assets now sample their textures the way the file says to: per-texture wrap and filter modes reach the GPU, so the community's favourite battle-damaged helmet renders its full texture set instead of near-black streaks. Tiling textures tile, pixel-art textures stay crisp.

The Case of the Hoarded Gigabytes

Found and fixed the leak that made every headless render permanently keep about 100MB: the bindless texture registry was immortalizing its texture views, and each one pinned an entire GPU device. Render farms, exports, and CI machines can breathe again.

The Mirror Test

Chrome finally mirrors its environment. The reflection blur schedule is now logarithmic and keyed to resolution, brushed metal streaks its reflections like actual brushed metal, and clearcoat reflects at its own polish instead of borrowing the base layer's.

Glass, At Last

Lux gets its first real transparency: transmissive materials render as actual see-through glass, sorted back-to-front, with Fresnel rims and correct glass-behind-glass compositing. Two overlapping spheres over a backdrop now look like two overlapping spheres over a backdrop.

The Fine Print Audit

Every material node's documentation now survives cross-examination: a permanent gate bans claims of physics the shader doesn't run. Brushed metal also learns to bend its environment reflections along the grain, replacing a flat brightness fudge.

Seven Dead Lobes

The BSDF node stack finally reaches the GPU: clearcoat, sheen, iridescence, anisotropy, subsurface, transmission and volume parameters now produce pixels instead of compiling into a side table nobody read. Velvet rims, second highlights, brushed bands and oil-slick colours, live.

Glitter With a Leash

Glossy normal-mapped surfaces stop firefly-sparkling under motion. The Kaplanyan specular anti-aliasing module that has been sitting in the shader library since the design phase is now wired into both mesh shaders, widening the highlight exactly where the pixel can't resolve the bumps.

The Resolution Dial

RenderScene grows an upscale_mode pin: render the 3D pass at 50, 67, or 75 percent resolution and a temporal upscaler reconstructs full size from jitter, history, and motion vectors. The Upscale node, meanwhile, now admits to being a bicubic filter.

Motion Vectors Clock In

Temporal anti-aliasing is now on by default, and it finally reads the per-object motion vectors the renderer has been producing all along. Spinning, sliding, and skinned things get smooth edges instead of ghost trails. You change nothing; your edges just stop being staircases.

Shadows Learn About Distance

Sun shadows now soften with occluder distance: crisp where a pole meets the ground, increasingly soft toward the tip of its shadow, the way actual sunlight behaves. The shadow_filter pin on every light node finally does something, with four filters to pick from.

The Shadow System That Never Was

Four thousand lines of virtual shadow map infrastructure leave the tree without a single pixel ever having missed them. A spring-clean release: the shadows you can see stay exactly as they are, and the shadow system that never rendered anything stops slowing down the ones that do.

A Thousand Lights, Six Times Faster

The 1000-light stress scene drops from 25 ms to 4 ms a frame on an RTX 5070. The culprit was not the lights themselves but the bounce-light cache politely interviewing every single light for every ray it traced. It now samples sixteen of them and trusts statistics, which is what statistics are for.

Lights With Actual Shapes

Area lights stop pretending to be points: rectangles, disks, spheres, and tubes now integrate their real geometry, ported straight from the canonical LTC reference. IES photometric profiles finally shape beams like the fixture datasheet says. Also the case of a rectangle and a sphere that rendered pixel-identically for months.

Every Light Pulls Its Weight

Point and spot lights finally cast shadows. Cube shadows for points, cone views for spots, scheduled on a per-frame budget so a 200-light club rig keeps its framerate. Also the story of a bias that quietly deleted every shadow past the midpoint of a light's range, caught by the test that shipped with the feature.

The Case of the Vertical Floor

A reported lighting collapse turns out to be a detective story: a test floor that had been standing on edge the whole time, a patch loader that swallowed typos, eleven bounce-light nodes that never existed at runtime, and one real shadow bug fixed at the end of it. Sunlight now survives every compass direction.

Sunlight on the Pool Floor

Water is transparent now: look down through the surface and the sea floor is there, refracted, colour-shifted by depth, and dappled with real caustics driven by the wave maths. RiverFlow makes the whole field travel and churn. Two more nodes stop being decorative.

Turning the Wind Up to Eighteen

The WaterSurface node now drives a real Tessendorf FFT ocean: a JONSWAP spectrum, four wave cascades, choppy crests, whitecap foam, and a displaced surface that depth-sorts against your scene. Set wind to 1 and get a pond; set it to 18 and get a storm.

Three Tables Find an Audience

The atmosphere model has been computing a physically based sky every frame and throwing it away. A new sky pass finally draws it: horizon gradients, a sun disc filtered through the atmosphere, and a sun elevation pin that behaves like the actual sun.

Clouds With Actual Shapes

The volumetric cloud system now traces, accumulates and composites real cumulus into your scene: billowing shapes with shadowed bases and gaps of sky, masked behind your geometry, driven by the coverage and density pins. Clouds also no longer require wiring a sky first.

Fog That Knows Where Things Are

Volumetric fog now composites into the frame for real: geometry dissolves into it at the right distances, near objects punch through it, and the density knob is connected to physics instead of a background tint. The six-week-old placeholder tint is gone.

The Fog Machine Was a Prop

The volumetric fog system now actually computes volumetric fog every frame, verified against the physics it claims to implement. No new pixels yet, that lands with the compositing pass, but the foundation underneath has stopped being scenery.

A CLI With Manners

Typo a flag and Lux now tells you so instead of opening a window on your display. There is a real --help, headless dumps honour your patch's declared resolution, and --dump-editor works on its own.

An Honest Readback

Heavy scenes now export reliably on NVIDIA hardware, and a failed frame capture says so out loud instead of handing you an empty image. The GPU readback path stops returning nothing and calling it success.

The Show Must Go On

Adding a node can no longer blank your output, the patch output is now chosen deterministically, and a new selector in the menu bar lets you pin any sink as the show while the driving node wears a little on-air lamp.

Stars in the Window

Generative content finally shows up in the live editor window, not just in exports. The display cache now tracks textures by what they are rather than what they were called this frame, and the texture pool stops buying a new texture every frame and throwing it away.

Two Keys Come Home

Space opens the node browser and Tab opens fuzzy search, exactly as the empty canvas has been promising all along. The two fastest routes from idea to node now actually exist under your fingers, and the cue transport politely waits for its own panel before borrowing the space bar.

Light Learns to Bounce

Surfaces in Lux now catch the colour of whatever sits next to them. Put a white object beside a red wall and its facing side picks up a warm red blush, the way real light spills off one surface onto the next. It is Lux's first global illumination: indirect, coloured, and aware of which way a surface is pointing.

The Models Arrive Dressed

Drop a glTF model into Lux and it now shows up wearing its own textures: the helmet has its scratches and decals, the wood looks like wood, the character keeps its skin. Until now every imported model rendered as a flat plastic version of itself, because the importer read the texture references and then quietly threw them away. Now it routes them all the way to the GPU, in the right colour space, for every channel.

The Default Look, Done by the Book

The tonemap is the last thing that touches your render: the curve that turns raw HDR light into the image you actually see. The default was quietly wrong, mid-grey too bright and bright colours drifting. It now runs the real ACES 2.0 transform, the same one film and VFX pipelines use, matched to the reference closely enough that the difference is invisible. Your default 3D look is now the industry's default 3D look, out of the box.

The Orphan a Deletion Leaves

Deleting the dead deferred renderer left a ghost behind: a GPU classifier whose every caller had just been deleted. This is the short one about chasing a deletion all the way to zero, and about a cost you pay without seeing it. Every line of 'keep it, might be useful later' is load time, memory, and a place for bugs to hide. The engine you run should be exactly the engine that is alive.