In an effort to make Aurora more interesting than just adding features to the existing engine I've decided to move it in a slightly different direction - to iOS. There are a million different path tracers out there and they're pretty much all doing a better job than Aurora anyway, but I haven't seen a decent lighting/material editing sandbox on the ipad yet. There are a couple of fractal renderers but I'd love to see one where you can bring in object files from apps like treesketch, one of the scuplting apps or simply a desktop modeler, and tweak materials, add textures and make it look nice.
Anyway, for now it's just an experiment for me to tinker with and see if I can make something like that happen, and it remains to be seen whether I can cook up something useful before getting bored and moving on to other things again.
After a couple of nights of coding, here's a bare bones version running on an early generation iPad:
The entire engine is still c++, with objective c being used only for the UI (which right now is as simple as it can possibly be). I've stripped out the tbb threading and embree bvh, so it's increadibly, unbelievably and unbearably slow.
-Espen
