Love2D RayTracing Example

A compact interactive SDF / ray / spectral toy renderer built with LOVE 12.0, Lua, and GLSL.

It focuses on realtime experimentation: scene switching, progressive accumulation, runtime OBJ importing, and live tuning from the pause menu.

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Preview

Fancy / Showcase

Potato / Showcase

What this is

This project is a shader-driven rendering playground that combines:

• signed distance field scenes
• progressive accumulation with a separate radiance-cache pass
• multiple tracing modes, from RGB previewing to spectral/path-traced rendering
• a runtime imported-object scene backed by an OBJ -> BVH -> texture-packing pipeline

It is built to be easy to run, easy to tweak, and easy to abuse.

Current features

• Five quality presets: Potato, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
• Five tracing modes:
  • RGB Rasterization
  • RGB Ray Tracing
  • Spectral Ray Tracing
  • Spectral Path Tracing
  • Wave Optics Rendering
• Four scene variants:
  • Studio
  • Showcase
  • House of Mirrors
  • Imported Objects
• Progressive accumulation with camera-aware reset behavior
• Radiance cache pass used by the spectral transport path
• Free-fly camera with mouse look
• HUD and compact HUD plus a pause menu split into Render / Import / Governor pages
• Adaptive runtime governor for render scale, frame budget, dummy movement preview, and RAM/VRAM import limits
• Recursive runtime OBJ browser for the objects/ folder
• OBJ import pipeline with MTL parsing, vertex-color support, missing-normal generation, triangle budgeting, BVH construction, and GPU texture packing

Quick start

Run from source

1. Install LOVE 11.5.
2. Clone or download this repository.
3. Put any test .obj files you want to browse into the objects/ folder.
4. Run the project with:

love .

You can also drag the project folder onto the LOVE executable on Windows.

Controls

In scene

• W A S D - move
• Mouse - look around
• Space - move up
• Left Ctrl - move down
• Left Shift - move faster
• Mouse Wheel - cycle quality presets
• Q / E - cycle runtime OBJ models and focus the imported-object scene
• F5 - rescan the objects/ folder
• R - reset accumulation
• Tab - toggle HUD
• F1 - toggle compact HUD
• Caps Lock - toggle input capture
• Esc - open pause menu

In pause menu

• Q / E - switch Render / Import / Governor pages
• W / S or Up / Down - move selection
• A / D or Left / Right - adjust setting
• Page Up / Page Down - large step adjustments
• Enter / Space - activate an item or open a dropdown
• Mouse - hover and select
• Mouse Wheel - scroll dropdowns or adjust the current item
• R - reset accumulation
• Esc - close the pause menu or close the active dropdown

Imported objects

The Imported Objects scene is the runtime mesh path, and at this point it is more than a simple preview toggle.

Notes:

• The browser scans objects/ recursively and only loads .obj files right now.
• .glb files can sit in the folder, but they are currently ignored by the runtime browser.
• .mtl sidecars are parsed and converted into the renderer's packed material parameters.
• Per-vertex color is respected when present.
• Missing normals are generated automatically when needed.
• Dense meshes can be triangle-sampled to fit the active import budget.
• The imported scene is centered/scaled automatically, then uploaded as packed triangle, object, mesh, and BVH textures for the shader.
• Texture map paths are parsed from MTL files, but imported shading still comes from packed scalar/color material data rather than direct texture sampling.
• Current hard caps are 81,920 uploaded triangles, 4,096 imported objects, and 16,384 imported meshes before softer RAM/VRAM budgeting kicks in.

Project structure

.
|-- .gitignore
|-- build.lua
|-- Fancy.png
|-- Love2D-SDF-RayTracer-LOGO.png
|-- governor.lua
|-- imported_scene.lua
|-- main.lua
|-- objloader.lua
|-- Potato.png
|-- README.md
|-- shader.glsl
|-- shared/
`-- objects/

Important files

• main.lua - app flow, camera, HUD, pause menu, and render orchestration
• shader.glsl - built-in SDF scenes, tracing modes, imported-BVH traversal, and accumulation logic
• imported_scene.lua - imported-scene build pipeline, material packing, BVH construction, and GPU upload
• objloader.lua - OBJ/MTL parsing, filesystem scanning, and mesh assembly
• governor.lua - adaptive render-scale and memory-budget logic
• shared/ - small math, path, and vector helpers
• objects/ - local runtime OBJ drop folder
• build.lua - packaging config for the LOVE build tool

Possible next steps

• direct texture sampling for imported materials
• clearer in-app reporting for import failures and active budgets
• more built-in scenes or saved camera presets
• denoising / temporal filtering experiments
• glTF / GLB support for the import path
• smarter low-end adaptive scaling

License

Don Source-Available Non-Derivative License (DSANDL) v1.2

See LICENSE.txt for the full license text.