Far-Beyond-Pulsar/Helio

A production-grade real-time renderer built on wgpu

WIP

Cross-platform, data-driven, physically-based rendering — with a render graph, radiance cascades GI, cascaded shadow maps, volumetric sky, and bloom — all in pure Rust.

🚀 Features

Rendering

• Physically-Based Shading — metallic/roughness PBR with Cook-Torrance BRDF
• Cascaded Shadow Maps — 4-cascade CSM with PCF filtering, zero Peter-Panning front-face culling
• Radiance Cascades GI — screen-space global illumination with smooth probe volume blending
• Hemisphere Ambient — HL2-style two-color analytical ambient fallback for areas outside GI coverage
• Bloom — multi-pass physically-based bloom

Lighting

• Directional lights (sun/moon with CSM)
• Point lights with attenuation
• Spot lights
• Per-light shadow casting
• Skylight ambient from atmosphere color

Sky & Atmosphere

• Rayleigh + Mie scattering — physically accurate multi-layer atmosphere
• Dynamic time-of-day — rotate the sun in real time; sky, shadows, and ambient all respond
• Cheap volumetric clouds — planar-intersection FBM clouds with analytical sun lighting and sunset tint; near-zero GPU cost

Architecture

• Render graph — automatic pass ordering and resource dependency resolution
• Pipeline cache — compiled PSO variants with instant hot-swapping via specialization constants
• Resource pooling — texture and buffer aliasing for minimal VRAM overhead
• Shared bind groups — proper resource sharing across features; no redundant uploads
• Billboards — GPU-instanced camera-facing sprites with correct depth occlusion

📦 Crates

🏁 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Rust stable toolchain
• A GPU supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, or WebGPU

Run the examples

# Sky atmosphere demo — sun rotation, colored point lights, clouds
cargo run --example render_v2_sky --release

# Basic scene — geometry, point lights, shadows
cargo run --example render_v2_basic --release

WASM example server (Ensure your browser ships with WASM and WebGPU (latest Chrome is a good bet))

Univrsal (https://github.com/powershell/powershell/releases/latest)

 ./build-wasm.ps1
 cargo run --release --bin helio-wasm-server

Unix

 ./build-wasm.sh
 cargo run --release --bin helio-wasm-server

Controls (sky example)

🔧 Usage

use helio_render_v2::{Renderer, RendererConfig, Camera, Scene, SceneLight};
use helio_render_v2::features::{
    FeatureRegistry, LightingFeature, ShadowsFeature,
    BloomFeature, RadianceCascadesFeature,
};

// Build the renderer
let config = RendererConfig::default();
let mut renderer = Renderer::new(&device, &queue, surface_format, config).await?;

// Register features
let mut registry = FeatureRegistry::new();
registry.add(LightingFeature::new(&device));
registry.add(ShadowsFeature::new(&device));
registry.add(RadianceCascadesFeature::new(&device));
registry.add(BloomFeature::new(&device));

// Describe your scene
let scene = Scene {
    lights: vec![
        SceneLight::directional([0.4, -0.8, 0.4], [1.0, 0.95, 0.8], 3.0),
    ],
    sky: Some(SkyAtmosphere::default()),
    ..Default::default()
};

// Render loop
renderer.render(&device, &queue, &surface, &camera, &scene, &registry)?;

🗺️ Roadmap

• SSAO
• Screen-space reflections
• Skeletal animation
• Point light shadows
• Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA)
• WASM / WebGPU target

📱 Android

$env:ANDROID_HOME = "C:\Users\...\Android\Sdk"
$env:ANDROID_NDK_ROOT = "$env:ANDROID_HOME\ndk\29.0.14206865"
cargo apk build -p feature_complete_android --target aarch64-linux-android

📄 License

MIT