OWL - News / Updates

Nov 8, 2020 - first public “introduction” of OWL on my Blog

Though OWL has been mentioned previously in various places, yesterday OWL was - for the first time - introduced as now being public, stable, and ready-to-use.

Oct 25-30 - OWL-based “ExaBricks” paper at IEEE Vis

This week at IEEE Vis we presented our “ExaBricks” paper on AMR data rendering, written completely in OWL: https://www.willusher.io/publications/exabrick

Oct 17, 2020 - first “Version 1.0”

After fixing the last few bugs and feature requests that stood in the way of doing so, OWL has finally been tagged as the first official, complete, stable release … V1.0

Jan 7, 2020 - first prototype with (most of) optix7course OBJ viewer

As of just a few minutes ago, OWL has passed another milestone in that I just managed to port the course tutorial from our Siggraph 2019 course on optix 7 (original code at https://github.com/ingowald/optix7course) to also work on OWL.

There’s still a two caveats with this code, namely that OWL does not yet that I do not yet expose denoising, and that it does not yet support a native “OWLTexture” type; both of which the final example in that course tutorial relied upon. For denoising, there was (as yet) no other way but to disable denoising in this sample; for texturing, however, I could actually use the existing CUDA based texture code, and simply upload the cudaTextureObject’s as SBT data, so texturing does actually work.

There were several bugs discovered in this sample, and quite a few more missing pieces than expected (eg, I had to add support for multiple ray types, multiple miss programs, variables for user types, and a lot of bug fixes); on the upside, the resulting code is (as hoped) significnatly simpler than the original one, and the current use of CUDA textures is a nice demonstration of how easy it is to do “CUDA interop”.

Code will need some more cleanup before release, but first sample pic here:

Dev 29, 2019 - v0.5.3 with first RTOW example on Node Graph Layer

Node graph layer shows first signs of life, now supporting the full “RTOW” (Ray Tracing in One Weekend) sample.

For a (very) rough idea of how the node graph API works, see this brief walk-through through the ng05-rtow sample.

Dev 25, 2019 - v0.5.2 and first successful app-port

v0.5.2 adds first part of node graph layer, with ng01-simpleTriangles example that ported ll01-simpleTriangles to node graph layer API (many ng parts still missing - so far only triangle geometry working)
successfully ported first ‘external’ app over to owl-ll: The app shown here is a pkd-tree based particle viewer initially written on OptiX 6, and now ported to OptiX 7 view the owl-ll layer. The pictures show two data sets (a ‘supersoot’ particle and a crack simulation) also referenced in http://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/Publications/2015/pkd/pkd.pdf

Dec 19, 2019 - First Public Version on Github

pushed version 0.5.0; still very early, but ll-api layer’s version of “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” working reliably on both Linux and Windows.

Dec 16, 2019 - First Draft of Web Page

this is the beginning of this new feed …