solvecraft/docs/render-path.md

Progressive product images

This integration is a draft. Final combined CPU, wasm and GPU verification and full-resolution showcase acceptance remain incomplete. Test descriptions below state intended coverage, not a claim that every backend has passed.

Native applications can register solidcraft_gpu::path::host() alongside the existing CPU image host. render.backends then exposes builtin/gpu-path with Preview, Image, PNG, Pbr, Progressive and Refraction. The browser keeps its CPU image host. Device discovery follows SOLIDCRAFT_GPU and WGPU_BACKEND; a device which cannot create the compute pipeline does not register an available path executor. The native UI retains a factory for the viewport's selected adapter at installation, without opening another device or compiling path shaders in Design (including safe-mode startup). The first entry into Render starts preparation once, asynchronously; if the viewport arrives later, that installation starts the already-requested preparation. Document changes retain the pending/ready/failed host, and failures are not retried on each viewport installation. It opens its independent job device on the viewport's selected adapter, so software fallback and safe mode do not rediscover a failing hardware driver. An incompatible explicit GPU policy leaves progressive rendering unavailable there. A driver that crashes the process while it compiles the path pipeline (#9236) is beyond error scopes and unwind guards, so a running setup keeps gpu-path-setup.json (its adapter key) in the settings folder and removes it when the setup answers or the app closes normally. A launch that finds it for the same adapter key leaves the setup failed with that explanation until the user chooses Try again; a driver update changes the key and so tries again. The path tracer runs on Vulkan, or on Metal on macOS (#3217). A viewport on D3D12 is reopened on the same GPU through Vulkan. Where there is no Vulkan or Metal driver (Windows over Remote Desktop or on the WARP software adapter, older drivers), the path executor reports itself unavailable and images render on the CPU. On an RTX 4090, D3D12 was never faster: equal per sample with DXC and about 55% slower with FXC, and it compiles the path shader at every start (about 82 s with DXC, about 2 hours with FXC), where Vulkan's compiled pipelines persist between runs.

In the Render workspace, select GPU path tracing and samples per pixel before checking or starting an image. These controls are transient image-job intent that can also be retained in typed saved setups. Each new saved concept uses the pending-format mechanism, without manually changing a version number. The canvas switches between live product preview and a large completed-image result, with Fit and 100% framing. Fixed-sampling jobs publish an immutable PNG after every complete nonfinal production pass, using the same transport, denoising and finishing as the completed image. Partially computed passes are not displayed. The host retains at most two prepaid snapshots; pinned external snapshots may skip a publication without stalling final rendering, and this is counted in preview_retention_skips. Screen repaints may coalesce fast complete-pass updates. Provisional PNGs never become exportable results or retained linear EXR masters. Adaptive jobs also publish each complete pilot pass and production iteration. Pilot images show the pilot mean; those samples remain excluded from the final master. Production images normalize unfinished sums by their completed iteration count and retain already finished pixel means. Neither readback nor the optional preview denoiser writes the production accumulation. Progress labels distinguish pilots from production iterations because production counts vary per pixel. The host target includes pilots plus the configured maximum production count.

Adaptive readback reserves one additional float4 plane (16 bytes per pixel). When denoising is selected, another independently reserved float4 plane supplies a normalized display input to the same filter; final denoising keeps its original production input. Final PNG and raw EXR remain identical with preview work disabled.

{"command":"render.start","params":{"settings":{"width":800,"height":600,"exposure_ev":0},"progressive":true,"samples":64,"max_depth":8,"seed":0}}

render.preflight accepts the same input. It resolves the Progressive capability to the installed GPU host and performs admission without reserving memory. Start checks again and returns the existing session/serial/generation identity. Progress reports complete samples per pixel; a partially computed sample is not counted. Cancel, status, retained-image ownership and atomic PNG export use the same host protocol as CPU jobs. Defaults are 64 samples, depth 8 and seed 0; the bounds are 1–4096 samples and 1–16 bounces. Sampling controls require progressive: true.

Runtime request-only glass overrides and an optional thin-lens camera and clear coat are available through those same commands. Neither adds saved document fields. Positive aperture requires perspective.

solidcraft-cli render examples/render-path-studio.json --out enclosure.png --progressive --samples 64 --max-depth 8 --seed 0 --width 800 --height 600

The CLI explicitly fails if a progressive request has no suitable device. Ordinary CPU requests retain their prior behavior. GPU PNG export averages linear radiance, applies saved exposure and the selected tone map (Reinhard by default), then encodes sRGB once. Runtime aces_fitted is described in studio lighting. A transparent background uses straight alpha; background color is independent of illumination.

The original integrator uses software BVH traversal, opaque GGX/Smith/Schlick and the symmetric diffuse attenuation defined by render::surface. Each hit evaluates the three existing directional studio lights with shadow visibility. Continuation samples a mixture of cosine-weighted diffuse and GGX normals with the combined PDF; Russian roulette begins after four hits. There are indirect bounces, but no environment illumination in the default legacy lighting profile. All legacy opaque colors use linear-sRGB base color, metallic 0, roughness 0.5, IOR 1.5. Explicit face appearances take precedence over body appearances.

Explicit optical appearances can now select smooth dielectric reflection, refraction, Beer–Lambert absorption and ideal thin sheets; see the transmission contract. Preview opacity remains a separate scalar-alpha approximation. Opacity below one without an explicit transmission record is rejected by the path executor. Runtime area lights, sun/HDR environment lighting and opaque planar color/normal maps are available through explicit job inputs. They do not add saved document fields. An optional bounded edge-aware a-trous denoiser filters progressive and final display images while preserving raw accumulation. Optional raw scene-linear EXR masters are retained only for completed images, before display filters. Texture LOD/mipmap selection and Final mode remain unimplemented by this executor; a path-traced preview does not declare those capabilities.

Each job builds a BVH over its immutable captured meshes with a sixteen-bin surface-area heuristic on triangle centres; there is no cross-document cache to confuse scene generations. A split is accepted only when a median split of its larger side would still keep the tree within 30 levels, the shader's 32-entry traversal stack; otherwise that node falls back to the median split. Traversal tests both child boxes at their parent and visits the nearer first. On the exploded coffee machine at 1080p and 8 samples per pixel, this halves render time on an NVIDIA GB10 (opaque 4.95 s to 2.49 s, closed glass 5.65 s to 2.79 s) with bit-identical images. Positions are rebased around the camera target before f32 upload. The upload packs indexed 32-byte position/normal vertices, 16-byte triangle records (including material IDs), 64-byte resolved materials, four-byte planar patch IDs and 32-byte BVH nodes. Geometry arrays share one buffer. The progressive executor requires six storage buffers per stage for geometry, BVH, accumulation, environment, textures and medium-failure counts; raster device requirements remain unchanged. Geometry must be within 1e7 mm of the camera target. Opaque and thin-sheet ray offsets use max(1e-5 mm, extent × 1e-7); closed glass instead retains an anchor and local displacement with strictly positive intersections, as described in closed-glass boundaries. These are bounded preview precision policies, not a robust CAD intersection oracle.

Each GPU dispatch computes at most 262,144 pixel paths at one sample index. The worker waits for that dispatch before checking cancellation and issuing another. A driver wait has a 30-second timeout; cancellation cannot preempt a stalled GPU dispatch. Encoding yields every four rows. Invalid indices/normals, nonfinite geometry, excessive dimensions and sampling controls are errors.

The GPU host admits at most 1,048,576 input triangles, 4096 pixels per side and 4,194,304 pixels in all. The actual storage-buffer limit may lower these caps. The source geometry cap is 128 MiB and the per-host pool is 512 MiB, including retained PNG leases. Conservative estimates account for CPU BVH construction, serialized and device geometry, accumulation, readback, RGBA and PNG buffers. Allocator/driver bookkeeping is not an OS quota. CPU and GPU workers have separate pools and each retains the established two-entry queue bound; a document still has at most two live jobs across both executors.

Validation lives in gpu::path::tests and engine render job tests. Set SOLIDCRAFT_REQUIRE_GPU=1 to make absence of an adapter fail device tests rather than skip them. BRDF parity is checked against the f64 oracle with 0.3% relative plus 2e-5 absolute tolerance. The near-white furnace allows 0.07 absolute error: the existing single-scattering Schlick model is not a perfectly conserving pure Lambertian surface, even at IOR 1. Same-adapter determinism compares the actual linear buffers bit-for-bit; cross-adapter bitwise identity is not promised.

The ignored path_performance test builds a 1,048,576-triangle procedural sphere and measures 1920×1080 dispatches, BVH construction and upload. Select sample count with SOLIDCRAFT_PATH_BENCH_SAMPLES (default 1). Run it explicitly with a clear GPU timing window; it is excluded from normal CI.

Dispatch and device-loss behavior

Each new path job begins with 64 paths. Completed submissions target approximately 20 ms and grow at most twofold, bounded to 64–16384 paths; a short image tail is smaller. Denoiser guide/filter passes use the same controller. Measured wall time includes scheduling contention, so this is a conservative responsiveness policy, not a promised GPU deadline or a substitute for the OS watchdog. Sample/seed and pixel identities are unchanged by tile boundaries.

Actual device-loss callbacks, uncaptured device errors and failed completion waits retire that native executor. Existing and new jobs refuse further device work; preflight/session metadata reports it unavailable without inventing new capabilities. The application must deliberately recreate a host to recover. Merely registering the same cached host or opening another document does not advertise it as healthy again.

Shared index-matched base response

The opaque base lobe uses the same Fresnel limit as OpaqueSurface: when the base IOR is exactly one, the dielectric fraction has no interface reflection at any angle. A metallic mixture retains its independently weighted conductor fraction. This applies to the specular term and both diffuse transmission factors. The existing actual-GPU BRDF oracle checks the limit at normal, oblique and grazing angles against the f64 surface, including mixed metallic values. Clear-coat and physical transmission contracts are unchanged by this base-lobe correction.

The normal GPU Samples editor keeps the exact requested count, including values such as 17 or 31; every complete pass is published. Merely opening a saved setup does not round its count. Use previous Render image defaults retains the previous power-of-two rounding for an edited GPU Samples value.