Argon

What is it about?

Argon is a GPU-accelerated spectral volume path tracer for generating HDR images of clouds and skies.

The idea behind developing Argon was to have a way to easily create photorealistic HDR environment maps for use in games and 3D content creation apps. The render engine is implemented completely in CUDA, with an interactive GUI developed using Qt.

Argon differs from general offline path tracers in the fact that it is specialized to rendering huge scenes completely described using an implicit procedural density function. With the spectral rendering combined with this scene description, cloud layers and densities of atmospheric gases are modeled using the same methods, and the light transport is calculated in one pass for the whole integrated scene. This offers greater realism than approaches where the atmosphere colors are calculated in a separate pass, cached into a texture and then used to illuminate the cloud volumes.

Even though Argon is an offline renderer, one of the design pillars is to have a fast interactive preview of the scene to reduce the time spent in doing final render iterations. The default camera mode is to produce 2:1 latitude-longitude images, which are supported by most engines and content creations applications, but other projections are also supported. The output is saved in linear color to a 32-bit EXR file.

Where to find it?

Argon is currently in closed alpha testing with a public release planned later this year.