This new major update brings light simulation with ray tracing, as well as some quality of life additions and bug fixes.

Changelog:

• Added ray-traced light simulation

• Added "Optics" tab

• Added new tools menu

• Added "Long Exposure" feature

• Added new presets showcasing the new optics features

• Added new basic stats for optics (enable optics to see them)

• Improved UI readability

• Galaxy Engine now uses 16 bits-per-channel color data internally. This enables more accurate colors, especially for dark values.

I decided to go for a PBR approach, meaning that you can make scenes and modify materials similar to how you would in a traditional 3D path tracer. The lighting simulation does approximate some things more than others, like energy conservation and dispersion.

The ray tracer is geometry-based, which means that it doesn't use mathematical functions for shapes. Instead, shapes are made out of individual edges, again, similar to 3D rendering tools. This means that walls and shapes have edge normals and vertex normals. These normals allow smooth shading while using actual geometry.

All that said, here is a list of features the ray tracer showcases:

Diffuse lighting

Specular reflections

Refraction

Emission

Specular roughness

Refraction roughness

Fresnel simulation

Index of Refraction (IOR)

Nested dielectrics with different IOR

Light dispersion

Total internal reflection

Sampling with ray accumulation

Wall creation

Draw shape tool

Lens creation tool

Circle creation tool

Diffuse color editing

Specular color editing

Refraction color editing

Emission color editing

Light color editing

Shape relaxation

Point lights

Area lights

Cone lights

Light spread

Here you can see a video that showcases some of the new features:

I have a background in 3D rendering, and now that I know how to code, I thought to myself: "I could make my own ray tracer!" And so, this is why I started working on this update. It was a fun experiment, and I'm glad that I did it. But now that I've finally finished it, I'm getting back to particles.

I hope you like it!