hikari
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Hikari viewport capture of the Bistro exterior at night, with illuminated windows, street lamps, and a blue scooter.
Rendering / Metal 4 · Direct3D 12

Every frame, considered.

Bindless resources, GPU-driven meshlets, and a shared lighting architecture. Built for native Metal 4 and Direct3D 12.

Inside the frame ↓

Main asset: Amazon Lumberyard Bistro by Amazon Lumberyard · via NVIDIA ORCA · CC BY 4.0

01 / The geometry path

Let the GPU decide what matters.

Scene geometry, materials, and textures live in shared GPU tables. Compute passes find visible meshlets and build indirect draw streams, keeping scene submission on the GPU.

  1. 01Address geometry and materials through shared tables
  2. 02Reject clusters outside the view, facing away, or occluded
  3. 03Build visible streams and indirect draw arguments
  4. 04Shade the surviving geometry through shared material data
Hikari meshlet debug view showing the Sponza courtyard geometry as individually colored clusters.
Sponza / Meshlet visualization

Main asset: Sponza Atrium by Frank Meinl / Crytek · License: source unverified

Bindless by design.

Geometry, materials, and textures live in GPU tables. Shared resource indices replace per-material texture rebinding.

GPU-driven submission.

Compute builds the visible geometry streams and indirect draw arguments. The GPU drives scene-mesh submission.

Small clusters. Less work.

Meshlets bring frustum, backface-cone, and two-phase Hi-Z culling to the GPU. Shadows use the same geometry-pulling architecture.

Ray tracing, integrated.

Ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections, and global illumination share the renderer’s material and geometry data.

Screen space, fully used.

SSAO, SSGI, and hierarchical screen-space reflections add contact, bounce light, and surface detail, with configurable quality budgets.

Light with volume.

Froxel volumetrics integrate light through fog and bounded media. Shape shafts, local smoke, and atmosphere with volume materials.

Stylized worlds

A world with its own colour.

Saturated colour, warm light, and soft haze. A stylized Japanese street captured in Hikari, showing another side of the renderer.

A stylized Japanese street rendered in Hikari, with orange and blue buildings, a wooden bridge, vivid green shopfront details, and warm haze against a bright sky.
Stylized scene rendered in Hikari · EXR capture converted to SDR WebP.

Main asset: Stylized Little Japanese Town Street by Michał Solarek · CC Attribution

02 / Light & atmosphere

Give light a presence.

Froxels divide the camera’s view into a 3D grid. The renderer injects lighting and integrates scattering through global fog and bounded local volumes. Volume materials shape the medium; scene shadow maps give the haze structure.

A metallic helmet surrounded by cyan, green, and pink lights in dense volumetric fog, with pillars casting long shadows.
Volumetric lighting study · In-engine EXR capture, converted to SDR WebP.
03 / HDR

Beyond ordinary white.

Scene colour stays linear and unbounded through exposure, bloom, and grading. Display mapping then resolves the image against the screen’s peak brightness and paper white. Hikari selects the output encoding for the active surface.

Scene-linear lightDisplay mapping + BT.2390 roll-offEDR · scRGB · HDR10

Automatic SDR fallback when HDR is unavailable. Web captures are SDR previews.

The Hikari HDR test scene with a stepped luminance chart, paper-white and true-black reference panels, a reflective sphere, and controls for output mode and paper-white brightness.
HDR calibration scene · Luminance steps and display controls. SDR web preview; HDR highlight differences are not reproduced.
Highlights with headroom.
Display-aware tone mapping and BT.2390 roll-off fit highlights to the screen’s current peak brightness.
A comfortable paper white.
UI and diffuse white share a configurable brightness reference, independent of HDR highlights.
The right output, automatically.
Detects OS-enabled HDR, falls back to SDR, and switches live without restarting the engine.