I'm an engineer and an artist, and most of what's here sits on the line between the two.
The engineer: about thirty years with light. LED systems, nonimaging optics, photobiological safety, and taking hardware to production at Philips, Lumileds and my own companies, with 25+ patents along the way.
The artist: studio code+wood. I turn digital logic into something physical.
- Wood engravings. An AI portrait or a 3D-rendered night street, turned into a dense field of lines by my own generative JavaScript, laser-engraved into black wood on a laser cutter I built, then filled by hand with oil paint I mix from linseed oil and pigment. Up close it's a tangle of lines; step back and a face looks at you.
- Wood relief prints in small editions, pressed by hand on a 60-year-old Korrex proof press.
- Generative work: Trajectories, Linea (non) Recta on fx(hash), and flow and erosion simulations that sculpt landscapes in real time.
- Vinny, a six-axis robot I'm teaching to paint.
The two halves feed each other. The erosion landscapes needed a path tracer, and what I learned from it is in the design of the one below.
Physically based light in the browser. A WebGPU path tracer that renders in real units, candela per square metre and lux, with a scene builder, a measuring tool, and an optics bench for LED and luminaire design that traces the same scene the picture shows. Nothing to install: it runs on your own graphics card. I think good optical tools shouldn't need an expensive licence and a workstation.
- tinywebgpu: one file, no dependencies, no build step. A WebGPU micro-framework for shader-first work (SDF tracers, GPGPU experiments, shadertoy-style pieces). ShadyTracer runs on it.
- GUISTUFF: UI widgets built on Tweakpane: a property table, a tree view and a split-pane container.
- CODEANDWOOD-TOOLKIT: the studio's JavaScript utilities for arrays, colour, SVG and paths.
- TSON: JSON with tables, matrices and unquoted keys. Every JSON file is valid TSON.
ShadyTracer is free and stays free, for students, makers, artists and anyone curious about light. If it's useful to you, a tip keeps it going, one-time or monthly: ♥ Sponsor on GitHub. Or hang one of my pieces on your wall: codeandwood.art.