Good Evening r/OpenGL! This project started off as LearnOpenGL tutorials and slowly morphed into a heavily GPU driven renderer, so that my school laptop wouldn't die running it :) It's not really an 'engine', its a finished, one-off demo to show off what I learned.

I modeled the island myself and put a lot of time into picking assets that I could actually host on GitHub. I'd love to hear any feedback you have on the repo, the demo, anything really.

Slight annoyance: the pre-compiled binary will have the "untrusted developer" pop-up from Windows Defender SmartScreen. Seems getting a certificate is not exactly cheap these days.

Thanks!

Repo:

https://github.com/Trichord/Island-Graphics-Demo

Direct Download:
https://github.com/Trichord/Island-Graphics-Demo/releases/download/v1.0.0/IslandDemo-windows-x64.zip

Some of you saw earlier versions of ModelViewer. The new release (2026.11) is the biggest one yet.

The raster side is still OpenGL: PBR with the glTF KHR material extensions (clearcoat, transmission, iridescence, sheen), shadows, AO, and section views. New is a ray tracer, Embree on the CPU and OptiX on NVIDIA GPUs, with OIDN denoising, plus a live hybrid mode that blends the two in the viewport. Making the ray-traced and raster images agree on materials and lighting was the hardest part, and I'm still working on it.

It also gained a simulation-results viewer (VTK, CalculiX, Exodus, OpenFOAM), 3D data plotting, and measurement and mesh tools. Free and open source (GPL-3.0), Windows and Ubuntu.

Release: https://github.com/sharjith/ModelViewer-Qt/releases/tag/Release-2026.11.0

Video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLffd2GzvPeAY

Happy to answer questions about the renderer, and I'd welcome feedback on anything that looks wrong.