indicatrix-cut

The desktop faceting-design editor: browse, search, and render your own faceting-design library with indicatrix's full spectral renderer, and edit cutting schedules with material retargeting and a solid inspection view. Import and export your own .asc files.

Built with Slint. This crate is both a library (indicatrix_cut) and a binary (indicatrix-cut) — the library exposes gui::build_main_window(), a fully-wired, not-yet-shown MainWindow.

Documentation map

This file is the entry point: building, what the app does, and the code structure. Deeper material lives alongside it in docs/:

• docs/settings.md — the settings file's location, persistence guarantees, render-quality controls, and remote-worker configuration.
• docs/remote-rendering.md — the preview-then-handoff model: when a render moves from local CPU to a remote worker, and how denoising and the TLS connection are handled across that.
• docs/export.md — how .asc import and export work.
• docs/gpu.md — the gpu feature and exactly when and why a frame falls back from GPU to the CPU tracer.
• docs/manual/README.md — the user manual, for lapidaries using the app rather than developers working on it.

Build and run

cargo build -p indicatrix-cut
cargo run -p indicatrix-cut

build.rs runs slint_build::compile("ui/app.slint") at build time, which pulls in theme.slint, types.slint, and everything under ui/components/. No platform-specific setup beyond what Slint itself needs (a Windows graphics backend) was found in this crate's Cargo.toml.

Working directory matters. The local catalog database is opened as a relative path (facet_diagrams.sqlite in the process's current working directory, not a fixed config directory), so running the built .exe from a different folder than expected opens (or creates) a different database. Exports are unaffected by this — every export asks where to save via a native dialog, and ./exports/ is only the suggested default.

Icon and console behaviour

build.rs embeds assets/icon.ico as a Windows resource, which covers both Explorer's view of the .exe and the window's own titlebar/taskbar icon — a Win32 window with no icon of its own falls back to the executable's first icon resource, so nothing needs to ship alongside the binary. Regenerate the icon with:

python scripts/make-icons.py

A release build sets windows_subsystem = "windows", so launching the .exe directly no longer opens an empty console beside the window. A debug build keeps its console, so cargo run still shows panics during development. If a tracing subscriber is ever added to this crate, it must write somewhere other than stdout — a release build has no console to write to.

The gpu feature

cargo build -p indicatrix-cut --features gpu

Routes both the viewport's progressive accumulation and the high-resolution export worker through indicatrix's verified GPU megakernel instead of the multithreaded CPU tracer. Off by default. Measured on this project's integrated AMD Radeon (Vulkan), at 960x540 / 64 spp / 12 bounces on Emerald: 1.44 s on GPU vs 10.66 s across 16 CPU threads, a 7.4x speedup. The fallback to the CPU tracer is per frame (per batch, for an export), not per session, and is a normal outcome, not an error — see docs/gpu.md for exactly when and why it happens.

What it does

• Search and filter your library by title/designer, shape, gear, and range filters on refractive index, L/W ratio, volume, and facet count.
• View a diagram in 3D with indicatrix's full spectral path tracer — orbit camera, adjustable lighting/exposure/material/quality, live optical-metrics readouts (brilliance/fire/scintillation/windowing/extinction) and a tilt-performance analysis graph — 19 measured tilt angles swept at four camera azimuths (0°, 45°, 90°, 135°), switchable or overlaid, with a hover readout that interpolates between the measured points.
• View the cutting-schedule table (facet/angle/index/notes) and any attached original files.
• Import your own .asc file(s) — a single file, or a folder, optionally including its subfolders — into the local library. Imports run off the UI thread with progress, and geometry-derived metadata (proportions, and a conservatively classified shape) is measured at import rather than left blank. Export a diagram back out as .asc — either its original attached file, byte-for-byte, or reconstructed from the stored angle/index table if no original is attached (a reconstructed file is explicitly marked as such — see indicatrix-formats's and indicatrix-vault's READMEs on mark_reconstructed).
• Rename/delete library entries.
• Export a high-resolution still — 1080p, 4K, or a custom size up to 8192×8192, at up to 32768 samples per pixel, in sRGB / Display P3 / Rec.2020 (the two wide-gamut choices carry an embedded ICC profile) — with a live thumbnail of the render as it progresses.
• Every path the app asks for — import source, environment map, certificate folder, and each export destination — is chosen through a native OS file dialog; the text fields remain, so a pasted path still works.
• Offload rendering to a remote indicatrix-worker over mutual TLS, with a preview-then-handoff model while the camera is moving (below).

Structure

src/
  lib.rs            slint::include_modules!(), pub mod gui, crate-private bridge/settings
  main.rs           entry point + the release-build windows_subsystem attribute
  gui/              callback wiring, one module per area of the UI
    mod.rs            orchestrator: DB, RenderContext, settings, callback wiring
    library/          import / rename / delete / export-.asc / shape editing
    detail.rs         detail loading, facet-plane reconstruction, file export
    search.rs         range-filter reading, diagram-list refresh
    remote/           settle detection, handoff wiring, merged-frame render/denoise
    render_export.rs  the high-resolution export's UI side
    ...               camera/lighting, materials, crystal optics, tilt profile
  bridge/           everything off the UI thread, plus pure logic it depends on
    render_thread/    the local progressive render loop and RenderContext
    export_thread/    the high-resolution export worker (local + remote engines)
    handoff.rs        pure preview/remote handoff state machine (no sockets/threads)
    remote_render.rs  the mutual-TLS TcpStream driver
    guide_pass.rs     primary-ray-only prepass for remote-frame denoise guides
    pixel_buffer.rs   zero-copy RGBA8 -> SharedPixelBuffer transfer
    ...               enrolment, ICC profiles, library mirror/source, girdle finish
  settings/
    model/            pure data/logic (no Slint or threading dependency)
    store.rs          on-disk TOML load/save, infallible on failure
    persist.rs        debounced background writer
assets/
  icon.ico, icon.png  generated by scripts/make-icons.py
ui/
  app.slint, theme.slint, types.slint, components/*.slint, icons/*.svg

MainWindow (ui/app.slint) layout: a top toolbar (search, shape/gear filters, range sliders, import, remote-worker configuration, denoise toggle), a diagram-list panel on the left, and on the right a detail header plus three tabs — the 3D viewport, the cutting-schedule table, and attachments.

Testing

cargo test -p indicatrix-cut

No tests/ directory — all coverage is inline #[cfg(test)]. What's covered: the HandoffMachine state machine exhaustively (including an all-state-pairs no-panic sweep), settings TOML round trips (including remote-worker fields and PreviewScale::Custom), the debounced settings writer, tonemap/denoise correctness and the "denoise is a no-op at converged sample counts" property, quality-preset label/index round trips, and filename sanitization. Nothing exercises the actual Slint window, a live socket to a indicatrix-worker, or the SQLite-backed end-to-end flow — per the source's own doc comments, those are left to manual verification.