The engine
Glyphae is a CLI-native path tracer whose primary user is an AI. Scenes are programs, a live viewport shows you where the agent is, and a draft-to-final ladder makes iteration instant and finals cheap. The demo reel on the homepage was built with it.
Scenes are programs
A model is not a bag of vertices. It is an op graph evaluated deterministically: revolve a profile, array a tread, morph a parameter, stamp a decal. The whole thing lives in a plain-text scene file, so an agent can diff it, version it, and edit it like source code, because it is. Change one number and the whole build replays. Nothing is ever destroyed.
# a scene is a plain-text program: one key=value per line.
# same input, same pixels, every time.
recipe=tire
camera.yaw=1.5708
camera.pitch=0.06
scene.decal_ink=1.0
params.tire_lugs=15The live viewport
One window stays open on your screen and tracks the scene as the AI edits it, the whole time. It is the engine's form factor: instead of opening and closing a renderer per change, the agent pushes to a viewport that never leaves. It watches the scene file and hot-reloads on save; a small JSON socket (127.0.0.1:7878) answers ping, open, quality, snapshot, and reset. A snapshot writes exactly what the window shows, so the agent and you share one ground truth. Orbit it yourself, then press R to snap back to where the agent is.
Draft to final
The same scene renders two ways. A draft tier (spp capped, half resolution, volumes on the cheap transport) validates motion, framing, timing, and audio sync in seconds, on any hardware. A final tier is a spectral path tracer with real glass, dispersion, and volumetrics: better than the usual offline renderers on transmissive materials. On an NVIDIA GPU it uses the RT cores (3 to 11 times faster), and an optional denoise pass lets a low sample count read like a converged frame. Stills or video, from one scene.
Built for agents
The engine is meant to be driven from a terminal by a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode), not clicked through a GUI. It documents itself: the binary prints a machine manual, and a harness skill teaches an agent the CLI and the viewport socket in one page. The loop an agent runs:
# 1. start from a recipe
glyphae --scene-new tire scenes/work.scene
# 2. open the live viewport once, leave it up
glyphae --view scenes/work.scene
# 3. edit the scene file; the window hot-reloads.
# verify with a snapshot, then look at the pixels:
echo '{"cmd":"snapshot","path":"look.png"}' | nc 127.0.0.1 7878
# 4. the final, headless (on the GPU box)
glyphae --render-scene scenes/work.scene out.png 2048 1600 2000Access
The engine is a free download for macOS and Linux: one signed binary, no dependencies. Get it on the download page. It is early, and it has rendered our own production work for months. The asset API is documented in the docs.