grad student, DigiPen Institute of Technology (neural rendering, light transport & materials)
I research light transport and materials for neural rendering, and build a custom C++ engine on the side. This site is a public notebook: essays, devlogs, and whatever I'm reading, roughly in the order they happen.
research log · est. 2019 · rss · github · rahulnair1229 (at) gmail (dot) com · latest essay →
Student-volunteered my way into SIGGRAPH 2026 in LA. Neural shading, Nsight internals, a room full of real-time rendering papers, and somehow ended up talking to Jim...
★ Porting Chief of the Valley to iOSTaking a desktop management sim to iPad and iPhone. Landscape orientation, touch targets, scroll behavior, audio, an in-game keyboard, and the legibility decisions that come with...
Chief of the Valley: Devlog 2, v1.0Staff overhaul, Steam integration, a bug report tool, and the fixes that had to happen before calling it v1.0.
Chief of the Valley: The First DevlogBuilding a turn-based PC company sim in C++17 and raylib from scratch. Everything that got built, broken, and rebuilt on the way to v0.4.
Porting the Render Lab to Linux: What Actually BrokeMigrating the render-lab project from MSBuild to CMake on Fedora. The build system move was straightforward. The four things that broke after that were more interesting....
Moving to Linux: How I Ended Up on FedoraCopilot on the OS, a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard, and Visual Studio. I had enough. Here is how the migration actually went.
Summer 2026: What Actually Needs to HappenFive things I'm committing to this summer: finishing the game, finding a thesis direction, making the most of Siggraph, getting off Windows, and some DSA.
Gitnook: Local-Only Version Control Inside Any Git RepoMy game team had a pile of untracked markdown files nobody wanted to commit and nobody wanted to lose. So I built gitnook.
GDC 2026: Talks, Roundtables, and No Small TalkSpent the weekend in SF for GDC with one goal: skip the parties and learn something. Here's what was actually worth the time.
Developing Snake on GBDK-2020Building a Snake workshop for Game Boy development using GBDK-2020. LCG RNG, sprite limits, bitplanes, and the limits of an 8-bit CPU.
A local-first LaTeX editor. Compiles offline with an embedded engine, no system TeX install required. Open source, MIT licensed.
A desktop management sim, built in C++ with raylib. Shipped on Steam, then ported to iPad and iPhone with touch controls and an in-game...
Local-only version control for personal files inside any git repo. Files tracked by gitnook are excluded from outer git and never pushed.
Small OpenGL lab engine for testing shaders and rendering techniques.
● now reading Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa · Redmond, WA · /now →