Krbn is a childhood dream I finally got to research & prototype (from a hospital bed of all places), during a medical break from my normal work: a rendering engine that draws 3D scenes the way a technical sketch artist would.
It asks "which lines would an artist draw and what would they leave out?"
Basically strokes are derived exactly from geometry, rather than sampling. True conics, quartics etc. So there is no shading model, it's replaced by hatching (either flat or following the curvature of the object). There's no alpha channel, the gaps between lines do the work as on paper. It introduces hand-wobble (which is seeded, so animations don't "boil" between frames) and various other things; the example gallery shows more.
With all that, output is byte-stable, i.e. two successive renders will cause zero changes in Git.
Full disclosure, since it matters here: this was built with significant AI assistance, deliberately, as an experiment in how far a carefully directed human-AI collaboration can get on a hard rendering problem. The briefs are in the repo - judge for yourselves.
Gallery: [https://github.com/vpalos/Krbn/tree/main/examples](https://github.com/vpalos/Krbn/tree/main/examples)
The longer story: [https://vpalos.com/2026/07/07/genesis-imperfecta-or-i-finall...](https://vpalos.com/2026/07/07/genesis-imperfecta-or-i-finally-built-the-pencil/)
P.S. There's no pitch here... just an invitation for a weekend skim over something I find fascinating.
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869159)
Points: 2