BRUTAL: the Colossus

One minute of the cinematic, from late afternoon to night and back toward dawn: 62 s, 9.3 MB, with sound.

The Observatory is a Godot scene. To see whether another engine could serve it, a prototype was built with BRUTAL, Ahwoo’s C# framework over Vulkan. It is an evaluation, not a move away from Godot, and there is nothing to download.

What the video shows

The swarm: ten thousand bodies, simulated by Jolt Physics at 120 steps a second, fly between the towers and gather into a colossal face. Its eyes and mouth glow.
The city: twelve brutalist tower variants, modelled by rule in Blender, with ribbon windows, egg-crate grids, fins and warning lamps.
The blocks: a structure on a mesa, generated by a small F# library from typed, nested blocks.
The light: each pixel follows one path of up to three bounces, with a shadow ray toward the sun at each. DLSS Ray Reconstruction denoises the paths, and DLSS Quality upscales 1067 × 600 to 1600 × 900.
The night: the sun sets on a 128-second cycle. The sky fills with stars, and the windows and lamps light up.
The sound: the swarm, the wind, a wordless chant and rushes, all synthesised in C# when the program starts, and placed in the scene with OpenAL Soft. There is no voice.

The swarm's face among the towers, in the afternoon haze, with the sun beside it — Afternoon: the face among the towers.

The face at dusk, close up, its eyes glowing among lit windows — Dusk: the eyes glow.

Looking up between the towers, their windows lit, toward a dim sky — Between the towers, looking up.

How it was measured

The video was rendered on one machine, a GeForce RTX 5080, on 2026-10-21. The program records at a fixed 60 frames a second, whatever its pace, and blends each pair into one frame of a 30 fps video: 6,720 frames for 112 seconds, of which this is one minute. The GPU took 7.37 ms a frame at the median and 13.34 ms at the 95th percentile, for the path tracing, the denoising and the upscaling together.

Why there is no download

BRUTAL’s licence, MIT-based, asks every distributed build to credit Ahwoo, to show the unaltered BRUTAL logo before it starts, and to ship its NOTICE.txt. This prototype is a local experiment and is not distributed.
DLSS needs NVIDIA’s Streamline libraries, which are not redistributed here.

Credits

Engine: BRUTAL by Ahwoo, under the BRUTAL License v1.0.
Physics: Jolt Physics (MIT).
Window and interface: GLFW (zlib), Dear ImGui and ImPlot (MIT).
Sound: OpenAL Soft (LGPL-2.1). Every sound is synthesised by the program.
Also, through BRUTAL’s packages: FreeType for the text and shaderc (Apache-2.0) for the shaders.
Upscaling and denoising: NVIDIA DLSS, through Streamline. NVIDIA, GeForce RTX and DLSS are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
The face: a portrait of an imaginary marble bust, painted by Z-Image-Turbo (Apache-2.0), cut out by BiRefNet (MIT), and made into a mesh by TRELLIS.2 (MIT) with DINOv3 features. Built with DINOv3. Every model ran locally.
Textures: generated locally with Z-Image-Turbo.
Towers: modelled in Blender by a script.