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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