SurfelPlus Readme

University of Pennsylvania, CIS 565: GPU Programming and Architecture, Final Project.

A project by Zhen Ren, Ruipeng Wang and Jinxiang Wang

This project is accpeted into SIGGRAPH 25 Poster track, the original paper could be found here: SurfelPlus: A Surfel-Based Global Illumination Solution Optimized for Low-End Graphics Hardware

IMPORTANT: This readme file will only include the basic setup and usage for this project. For a complete development log and demo, please visit this site: SurfelPlus Project Page

Demos

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2aecac2c-b9ec-486c-b237-a38070e0a42e

Introduction

SurfelPlus is a real-time dynamic global illumination renderer built on top of NVIDIA's vk_raytrace framework. Using Vulkan ray tracing and surfel-based techniques, SurfelPlus aims to deliver high-quality lighting effects with dynamic scene updates, providing an efficient solution for realistic and immersive visual rendering in real time.

Setup

You can use cmake to build this project.

git clone https://github.com/WANG-Ruipeng/SurfelPlus.git
cd ./SurfelPlus
mkdir build
cd ./build
cmake-gui ..

• The original vk_raytrace renderer will require cloning both the nvpro_core and the vk_raytrace renderer itself. In our project, we did this for you so you only have to clone this repository.
• We recommend build this project based on Visual Studio 2022 as it is used by everyone in the team.

Usage

Controls

Action	Description
LMB	Rotate around the target
RMB	Dolly in/out
MMB	Pan along view plane
LMB + Shift	Dolly in/out
LMB + Ctrl	Pan
LMB + Alt	Look around
Mouse wheel	Dolly in/out
Mouse wheel + Shift	Zoom in/out (FOV)
Space	Set interest point on the surface under the mouse cursor.
F10	Toggle UI pane.

Change glTF model

• Drag and drop glTF files (.gltf or .glb) into viewer

Change HDR lighting

• Drag and drop HDR files (.hdr) into viewer

Loading Different Models

All of the scene file resources are under downloaded_resources folder. You can edit the main function in the main.cpp file to load different models.

InputParser parser(argc, argv);
std::string sceneFile   = parser.getString("-f", "Sponza/Sponza.gltf");
std::string hdrFilename = parser.getString("-e", "std_env.hdr");

Enjoy! :)