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January 2026 is all wrapped up! Next month’s page is: February 2026 Pixel Storm Updates
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January 2026 Summary
January 31, 2026 8:30 PM (PST)
Sky & Atmosphere System
- Implemented a full procedural sky and atmosphere rendering system based on the Hillaire technique
- Created LUT (Look-Up Table) generation pipeline for transmittance, scattering, and sky color
- Added Mie scattering using HG Draine phase function for fog and cloud rendering
- Implemented dynamic sun positioning and time of day system
- Sky works seamlessly from ground level all the way to space
CUDA ImGui Backend
- Built a complete CUDA backend for dear imgui to replace your Vulkan backend
- Implemented software rasterization in CUDA (reading "High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs" paper)
- Added blending and texture support
- Created reusable vertex and mesh data structures for future game UI
Performance Optimizations
- Implemented triangle binning in your rasterizer, dramatically improving UI performance
- Discovered and fixed OptiX IAS rebuild issue - now rebuilding every 5 frames instead of just updating
- Learned CUDA shared memory patterns with
__shared__ and __syncthreads() for cooperative thread work
Collision Detection
- Implemented BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) with both static and dynamic variants