resolved

Renders what a spacecraft camera sees: Earth, Moon, Sun and a target spacecraft loaded from a mesh. The inputs are an epoch, the observer and target states and attitudes, and a camera model. Images are radiometric: the renderer works in radiance and converts to electrons and then DN through the camera's optics and detector, so an image should match what a real camera with the same parameters records.

It is built for closed-loop simulation, where each step renders one frame and latency is the number that matters. The target is 1–2 MP RGB in under 100 ms end to end on a mid-range GPU (the reference is an RTX 3060). Lighting fidelity and camera fidelity are selected separately, and each tier is benchmarked, so a run can trade fidelity for speed knowing what each step costs.

Rendering goes through wgpu. On a machine without a GPU, the same shaders run on the CPU through Mesa's lavapipe (vulkan-swrast on Arch, mesa-vulkan-drivers on Debian and Ubuntu).

Status

Early development. Nothing renders yet. The work is tracked as Gitea milestones, each split into one issue per change:

Milestone	Scope
M1	Scene API, headless wgpu, analytic Earth/Moon/Sun, glTF and STL targets, Lambert shading with eclipse, pinhole camera, radiance to DN, CLI, benchmark baseline
M2	Self-shadowing, Earthshine and Moonshine, Earth and Moon albedo maps, Sun limb darkening
M3	Lens distortion, PSF, detector noise, saturation and blooming, stars
M4	BRDF and spectral materials, atmospheric scattering, clouds, lunar terrain
M5	Portable ray tracing, path tracing, label outputs for ML
M6	Validation against lunar, Earth and Mitsuba references; motion blur, rolling shutter, stray light; multi-band and 4k

Conventions

• SI units throughout: meters, seconds, radians, watts.
• Scene state is f64 in an inertial frame (GCRF). The GPU only sees f32 coordinates relative to the camera.

Layout

• crates/resolved: the library.
• crates/resolved-cli: the resolved command, for rendering without writing a host program.
• docs/optics.md: the optics and radiometry the renderer models, explained for readers without an optics background.

Development

Point git at the committed hooks once per clone:

git config core.hooksPath hooks

pre-commit runs formatting, clippy and the library unit tests; pre-push runs the full test suite, including doctests, and the documentation build.

The integration tests render on both a hardware GPU and lavapipe, so running them needs a Vulkan driver for the GPU and lavapipe installed. Set WGPU_BACKEND, WGPU_ADAPTER_NAME and the other standard wgpu environment variables to steer adapter discovery.

To see what the GPU tests render, set RESOLVED_TEST_IMAGES=1. Each test then writes a PNG per device to target/tmp/test-images/, scaled so a white surface facing the Sun is full white:

RESOLVED_TEST_IMAGES=1 cargo test --test bodies --test mesh

License

MIT