Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Real-Time Volumetric Clouds Source Code
Ray marched volumetric clouds source code in OpenGL 4.6
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1

It's been closed source for a long time while I worked on it on and off as a hobby research project, but yesterday the repo was made public for the first time under the MPL 2.0 license. A feature reel showing its capabilities can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/feature_re... A technical breakdown of a single frame can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/frame_anal... It's still in a very beta state (bugs and instability expected), but I felt like it was a good time to make it…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2RT
2023 · antimatter15.com · its alternatives →
- 3

I've been going through Cem Yuksel's "Introduction to Computer Graphics" course and thought that writing a volume renderer would be a good way to test my knowledge. It is a common technique used to render 3D medical data. Works by ray marching a specific step size, reading a 3D texture (e.g. MRI data), and calculating opacity values. Code should be easy to get started with for anyone familiar with the JS ecosystem. Questions for the HN community: I spent 20-25% of the entire time just setting up the project and fighting issues with the JavaScript ecosystem. This experience has made me…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5AR
2018 · tylermw.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Been making this rasterizer engine in C++ for the past few months, now also adding ray-tracing functionality to the system. Simply load a model or generate a mesh, add some lights, and render.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

I'm the co-creator and maintainer of https://aframe.io/ and long time Web 3D graphics dev. Super excited about new techniques to author / render / represent 3D. Spark is a an open source library to easily integrate Gaussian splats in your THREE.js scene I worked with some friends and I hope you find useful. Looking forward to hearing what features / rendering techniques you would love to see next.
2025 · sparkjs.dev · its alternatives →
- 8

GPU Raytracer from scratch in C++/CUDA. Contribute to jan-van-bergen/GPU-Raytracer development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Shader Vision▲138Real-time GPU shader editor for spatial computing
2024 · shader.vision · its alternatives →
- 10

C++ Path Tracer from scratch with zero third-party libraries. - themartiano/luz
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11OS
2019 · alexanderperrin.com.au · its alternatives →
- 12

Browse and share GPU-made GIFs. Explore GLSL shader experiments, search by topic, and open any piece in the editor to learn or remix.
2018 · shadergif.com · its alternatives →
- 13

This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing. Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia. Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon. Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
Feb 2026 · makie.org · its alternatives →
- 15

- 16

Virtual reality gadgets are embodied in volumetric graphics
2020 · craftwork.design · its alternatives →
- 17

Create evolving artistic images with hot-code-reloaded Lisp and GLSL.
2021 · blog.tonari.no · its alternatives →
- 18
RayThis▲178Generate pretty code snippets right out of VSCode
2021 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
- 19WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
- 20

Mobile-first 3D mapping engine with emphasis on user experience - felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21TF
I always enjoy reading posts about indie game development and looking at the source code of games other people have built. So for any game I release I naturally I want to do the same. https://github.com/Mknsri/HockeySlam Hockey Slam is a hockey shootout game on Android which I built almost from scratch. Some of the engine features include 3D graphics with PBR materials, a rudimentary physics system, replays, a multithreaded job system and a hot-reload DLL platform for developing on Windows. I detailed the creation of the game in it's own post, but now that time has passed…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 22PV
2016 · guillaumechereau.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23

Water-Simulation with real time specular reflection on the waters surface. The reflection is implemented in GLSL and runs on the GPU and in screen space. The water itself is implemented using a pressure based approach for the surface calculation. - MauriceGit/Water_Simulation
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Goxel: Free and Open Source 3D Voxel Editor . Contribute to guillaumechereau/goxel development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- StratusGFX, my open-source real-time 3D rendering engine alternatives
- Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting in WebGL alternatives
- Volume rendering 3D data in Three.js and GLSL alternatives
- I've made a Monte-Carlo raytracer for glTF scenes in WebGPU alternatives
- A raytracer to shade topographic maps in R alternatives
- VSC – An open source 3D Rendering Engine in C++ alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →