Hey HN, I'm Julius, I'm a backend engineer at Hatchet and created this demo to show off some of Hatchet's new features, primarily durable streams and serverless endpoints. Those, however, are just background details that made this significantly easier to scale. By distributing the rendering across many different nodes, orchestrated using Hatchet, it makes it possible to render quite high fidelity scenes fairly quickly. All of this would be possible on a single machine, but would be much slower without dedicated hardware (RT cores, etc).

The renderer itself is using well-known ray tracing techniques, with no special considerations there. The renderer is a slightly modified version of https://github.com/ekzhang/rpt, with additional support for SDF scripting using https://docs.rs/fidget/latest/fidget/. SDFs have been popular in the demoscene community, though perhaps not super well known outside of that, and are capable of creating some fantastic looking scenes: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ld3Gz2. The coolest part here is using a DSL to represent the SDFs in a rendering pipeline, and using LLMs with a chat interface to create them.

The source is available here: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/distributed-ray-tracer