Steve Troughton-SmithBack at it
Operating well outside of my level of expertise here with Codex, but it's doing a pretty credible job at a lot of complex Metal rendering code I would never be able to wrap my head around
(Ignore the UV issues)
You can just do stuff, now. It's wild.
I'm not yet sure what the end goal is here, but I'm making a lot of progress regardless
I started with a blank project template 5 hours ago. Now I've got a little 3D scene graph editor with gizmos, wireframe and shaded view modes, texturing, drag and drop OBJ file importing, and tile-based raytraced rendering, that runs on Mac and iPad.
Thanks Codex!
OBJ drag and drop
Multi-select and grouping
You know what I really could use at WWDC?
Teach a generative model to build high-quality vector SF Symbols so we can make custom ones, like say a full set for 3D modeling suites or PencilKit drawing apps, on demand 👀
…asking for a friend…
Upgraded my raytraced renderer with bounce lighting and true reflections. Now it looks pretty legit!
'Could somebody with no programming experience recreate Photoshop with an LLM?'
I have absolutely zero Metal and near-zero 3D modeling experience. I know the basics of how to use a scene editor, and the names of rendering terms.
And I effectively vibecoded all of this in less than half a day with Codex 5.3 Medium, based on screenshots of a cool-looking app I've never used (Valence3D) and just a general sense of what a 3D app should do
Raytracing uses every last ounce of my poor M1 Mac mini's GPU. It has never seen such a workout
Since I am doing this on the GPU, not CPU, finding a way to render complex meshes without blowing the budget is a headache. There's a hard cap on how much work you can do before the Metal driver crashes
It’s a warm, sunny day, so I moved outside to sit with the dog. My iPad has a much faster GPU anyway, so rendering works great here side by side with my Mac over VNC. And it’s a nanotexture model, so working in direct sunlight is effectively the same as working indoors 😁
Sean Heber@stroughtonsmith sunny enough to sit outside?! It's 2.8C here. 🥶
Added some targeted calls to the hardware raytracing APIs, and a toggle switch so I can flip between non-accelerated RT and accelerated RT. There are plenty of bottlenecks in my renderer to stop it taking /full/ advantage of acceleration, but holy heck it’s much faster regardless. This is on the M5 iPad Pro
Turns out the M1 supports enough of the hardware accelerated raytracing APIs that I get a massive speedup here, too?
Trying to parse Apple's Metal feature support tables is hurting my brain, so I'll just accept it and move on
Edward Munn@stroughtonsmith I don't think hardware raytracing was added until M3 — that M1 GPU must be cooking!
@edmn yeah it's not using hardware-accelerated raytracing. I don't know enough about the feature to know whether that would even be useful in multi-minute raytracing of static images rather than optimizing things for realtime
@stroughtonsmith Sounds like you need to buy an M4 Mac mini!
K0bin@stroughtonsmith Did you build the path tracer yourself or is that a system library?
And what exactly will this tool do? I assume you're not building a full modelling tool.
@k0bin Codex built it from scratch. I don't know what it will do yet, I'm just experimenting
fatlazycat@stroughtonsmith add in some radiosity to really test it 😀
@fatlazycat it's already doing bounce lighting
Guy Brooker@stroughtonsmith are you using Codex GUI app, or are you using codex trough the Xcode 16.3 AI CLI ?
@guybrooker the Codex app. Xcode has too many guardrails in place
AnimeAndVisial@stroughtonsmith This is what vibe coding should be used for. AI should be used to screw over Autodesk and Adobe
Take It EV Podcast 🎙️@stroughtonsmith @stern what we need is a blender-light
@stroughtonsmith @stern that would be nice. But given how bad Creator Studio is, with its upsell nags - I hope it won't be. But who knows. World needs something like blender - free and good, but "light" . I know how to use blender but I still have to look up tutorials from time to time to do basic things. It has soooo many features!
Nico Reese@stroughtonsmith Seeing all this makes me wonder how Codex would fare with building a Unity game project from scratch.
Sim@stroughtonsmith wonderful, it looks really clean too. Is it all Codex? Or did some of your experience come into play during development? Do you think you could get it to a shippable state?
@simsaens I'm trying to recreate Valence3D based on what I see on the website, since Apple hired the developer and it's not likely to see any new development. So, for now, the visual identity isn't mine. As I keep progressing it, I expect that to diverge a lot more. I'm guiding Codex through it bit by bit, it wouldn't come up with anything like this on its own; but it can blast through a raytracer no problem
@stroughtonsmith it’s weirdly reassuring that your experience and creative taste are still important. These tools really let us focus on building the fun bits
Gernot (@[email protected])
The more I work with Claude & Codex, I think two points are equally true: ⁃ I could not have done this without the AI ⁃ The AI could not have done this without me. I’m no longer stuck and I’m excited for what I’m building. This is going to be sooooo good.
@stroughtonsmith @gernot yeah though sometimes you get me doubting that when you casually produce a full scene editor with gizmos, raytracer, viewport orientation widget, and an inspector with gesture-based numeric sliders in five hours
@simsaens did I mention I know absolutely nothing about Metal? 😅
@stroughtonsmith you did but thanks for making it clear 😛
TheEJJ 🇨🇦@stroughtonsmith @simsaens This is all reminding me of how much I miss iTracer. https://page-online.de/tools-technik/itracer/
iTracer
iTracer Kategorie: Produktivität Entwickler: Fabio Policarpo © Fabio Policarpo 3,3 MB (iPhone) und 3,3 MB (iPad) 4,99 € (iPhone . Version 1.9) 4,99 € (iPad . Version 1.9) Beim 3D-Modelling spielt das Rendern eine wichtige Rolle - zumindest, wenn es schnell gehen und trotzdem gut aussehen soll. iTracer hat hier eindeutig eine seine...
Frank Rupprecht@stroughtonsmith Is this sidebar/inspector pane a system component or custom?
@fuzzyhead all custom
Dani
Jackson Hayes@stroughtonsmith RealityKit?