← All resources

Surfel-based global illumination on the web

Auto-discovered

Blog Advanced

Jure Triglav

Visit resource ↗

Description

Surfel-based global illumination on the web is a January 2026 interactive article by Jure Triglav on implementing surfel GI with WebGPU compute shaders in the browser.

It walks through surfelization from a G-buffer, a camera-centered cascaded 3D grid inspired by Kajiya, BVH ray queries via three-mesh-bvh, hemisphere guiding, multi-scale mean estimation for temporal stability, radial depth atlases against light leaks, and a resolve pass that shades pixels from nearby surfels. Interactive WebGPU demos illustrate each stage on scenes such as Sponza.

It is for intermediate to advanced web graphics programmers comfortable with compute passes, G-buffers, and real-time GI approximations.

The piece is a free long-form HTML post with embedded demos that require a WebGPU-capable browser.

It is useful as a full pipeline narrative for bringing SEED-style surfel GI ideas onto the open web.