Athens, Greece
Graphics Engineer
Rendering, game engines & AI agents in 3D worlds.
Passion projects and coursework that have shaped my path.
A game engine built to explore real-time ray tracing
A two-person engine written from scratch in modern C++ with Vulkan. A testbed for hybrid rendering: deferred rasterization plus hardware ray tracing for shadows, reflections and global illumination, built end to end from the render graph to the ECS and editor tooling.
Unbiased Monte Carlo reference renderer inside Raygen
A single-path Monte Carlo pathtracer used as Raygen's ground-truth renderer. Next event estimation and multiple importance sampling drive fast convergence. Layered diffuse and specular BRDFs/BTDFs cover a wide material range. Russian roulette termination keeps the estimator unbiased while culling insignificant paths.
Real-time soft shadows and specular highlights from mesh lights
Area-light shadowing is resolved with ray-traced visibility queries, then denoised with an SVGF-style spatiotemporal filter for temporal stability. Specular response uses the representative point method: the reflection vector is snapped to the closest point on the light mesh, giving a convincing highlight from arbitrary emitter shapes at real-time cost.
Diffuse global illumination for Raygen's real-time renderer
A variable-density grid of light probes, each baked by capturing its surroundings with the stochastic pathtracer into a low-resolution cubemap. At runtime, diffuse GI is reconstructed by trilinearly blending nearby probes, much like sampling a 3D texture of incoming radiance, with the surface normal reprojected per probe to correct for the positional offset.
Physically based sky simulation via ray marching
A ray-marched atmosphere model computing Rayleigh and Mie scattering from physical coefficients and astronomical parameters. The shader ships with Earth-like values but is fully parameterized: hazy urban skies, sunsets on alien planets, or any star's spectrum fall out of the same integral.
Graphics engine with hot-swappable renderers across APIs
Kaleido lets you register multiple renderers (OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D11, or an offline pathtracer) and swap them at runtime against the same scene, making it ideal for comparing a real-time approximation against ground truth. It provides multithreaded asset loading with automatic caching, an extensible loader system and an ImGui editor over a scenegraph.
Foveated ray generation for photorealistic VR
VR lens distortion means peripheral pixels contribute far less than central ones, so why trace them at full density? This technique varies the ray-generation rate across the image via an adjustable mask, cutting the ray budget for stereoscopic path tracing while preserving perceived quality. Built on OptiX with the Oculus SDK as part of a custom VR ray tracing engine.
Light-volume-clipped ray marching for god rays
A post-process ray-marching technique simulating in-scattering through participating media. The key optimization clips each ray to the light's influence volume before marching: the bounded segment matched the visual fidelity of an unclipped ray using 10× the sample count, at a fraction of the cost.
From the graphics course that introduced me to the field
A game built with a few classmates for a graduate graphics course. Contributions here spanned game design, special abilities and their audiovisual feedback, actor movement and physics, spawning systems and boss AI, plus rendering work: soft shadows, depth of field, bloom and normal mapping. The team took it well beyond what the assignment required.
Architecting the core graphics systems behind Metasteps' products across mobile, WebGL and VR. Pioneering rendering techniques and AI tooling to raise interactivity and visual fidelity, mentoring engineers and artists on engine internals, and serving on the leadership team guiding graphics across gameplay, tools and product strategy.
Extended and optimized Unity to ship high-performance products on mobile, WebGL and VR. Built internal tools that streamlined asset workflows and build management, led the artist team's asset creation and optimization pipeline, and mentored junior engineers.
Thesis: Photorealistic Virtual Reality, a custom engine for high-performance photorealistic VR with a stereoscopic ray tracer and lens-matched sampling. Awarded a scholarship from Omilia Conversational AI as one of the top three students of the programme.
I'm a graphics engineer with an MSc in Computer Science and over 5 years in the industry, specialized in real-time rendering and game engine architecture. I've built game engines from scratch in C++, with Vulkan, OpenGL and Direct3D backends. Much of that time has gone deep into physically based lighting, ray tracing, path tracing and global illumination. I've also shipped commercial projects in Unity across mobile, WebGL and VR. These days my work increasingly sits where AI meets real-time graphics: agents that reason about and act inside 3D worlds. Beyond the technical side, I care about mentoring, passing on what I have learned and helping the engineers and artists around me grow and reach their goals.
Real-time rendering · Game engine architecture · Ray & path tracing · Global illumination · VR / AR
C++ · C# · Unity · Vulkan · OpenGL · Direct3D · WebGL · GLSL · HLSL
AI agents · Multi-agent systems · LLM engineering · Embeddings
Python · JavaScript · Unreal Engine · Blender · n8n
Interested in graphics, engines, or AI-driven 3D? Let's talk.
ioansmoschos@gmail.com