This project brings real-time, ray-traced material editing to Radiant Foam – transforming a groundbreaking neural renderer into an interactive tool for creative exploration.
This project was completed alongside Chinmayi Ramasubramanian as work for the Princeton graduate course Neural Rendering led by Felix Heide. Special thanks to our teaching assistants, Jipeng Sun & Erich Liang for their outstanding guidance and support.
System Highlights:
Physically Accurate, Creatively Controllable
– Users can add ray-traced spheres with glass, metal, or matte finishes – each responding to light with realistic reflection, refraction, and shading.
– Built on a hybrid renderer that fuses CUDA-based ray tracing with Radiant Foam’s differentiable core, preserving real-time performance while unlocking complex material visualization.
An Interface Built for Play
– A lightweight and responsive GUI lets users place, animate, and tune materials in real time to adjust color, reflectivity, refractive index, and animations paths.
– Designed for accessibility - even novice users can explore complex light interactions without touching code.
Tested for Speed. Delightful to use.
– Benchmarks showed stable FPS even in complex scenes, with GPU load rising predictably and CPU strain dropping - confirming the system’s capabilities for live creative use.
– In user studies, first-time users described the tool as “exciting” and “amazing,” learning more through exploration than explanation, and walking away with a sense of ownership.
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