vork is a free 3D renderer an AI coding agent drives

vork is a free 3D and VFX renderer from Voyager that an AI coding agent drives instead of a person. The voyager-so/vork repository went public on November 5, 2026, and version 0.1.0 shipped on November 6 as a research preview. It drew more than 750 stars in its first two days, read November 7, 2026. There is no editor window and no timeline. An agent writes a scene as code, renders it, looks at the picture and rewrites the code until the shot works.

What makes vork unusual in November 2026 is what it does not do. It does not generate video. Its VFX example adds a rendered ceramic-and-bronze object to a real Pexels clip of a woman asleep at a table, tracks the camera, holds the object behind her moving hand with occlusion mattes, and relights the room to match. The README's own line for that shot is "Real footage + rendered 3D; no generative video."

What is vork?

vork is the rendering kernel from Voyager, the company behind a desktop app for creative work; the copyright line in its license names Nullframe, Inc. It is written in Rust and Slang and renders on the GPU through Vulkan and Metal. Voyager calls it "a headless 3D and VFX engine built for agents": no window, just a renderer the assistant drives.

The pitch is that tools built for people need thousands of settings, because a person cannot write a shader in the middle of a shot. An agent can. So vork's kernel holds only what an agent cannot write on the fly, like geometry and ray queries, and lets scene programs define materials, cameras, light propagation, simulation and compositing. Voyager says the core API is described in about 2,500 tokens, including a complete first scene.

How an agent drives it

A vork scene is a JSON document of meshes, lights, cameras, materials and animation tracks. Python and TypeScript SDKs can write that JSON, and rendering is one command. The starter file, examples/first-scene.json, is a blue sphere on a gray grid floor, a rectangular light and a camera, in four nodes.

The loop is the point. The agent writes the scene, runs a render, opens the PNG and revises. Every change is a code edit that can be read, diffed and undone. For shots that need more than scene data, a scene can carry Slang programs through public hooks that change camera rays, material response, light propagation and film response without editing the renderer. Voyager's black hole example supplies a Schwarzschild light-propagation program inside the scene itself, and the README calls that a numerical approximation, not an exact relativistic solver.

What you need to run it

vork needs specific hardware. On Linux and Windows it wants a recent NVIDIA GPU with hardware ray tracing and its Vulkan driver, on Ubuntu 22.04 or newer or Windows 10 and 11. On macOS it runs on Apple Silicon with Metal, and the bundled Slang toolchain targets macOS 26. Older macOS versions are unqualified, and Intel Macs, AMD and Intel GPUs and software Vulkan are unsupported.

Recency alone does not make an NVIDIA card suitable. The README names the A100, H100, H200, B200 and B300 as data-center cards that lack the required hardware ray tracing. There is no browser demo, but Voyager can lease a cloud GPU that runs vork from a paid workspace, so a qualifying card of your own is not strictly required.

What it costs

vork is source-available, not open source. The vork Preview License makes it free to use during the research preview, "including for commercial work", and free inside a company of any size. It permits modification for personal use and sharing unmodified copies, and bars selling, renting or sublicensing vork, distributing a modified version, and offering it as a hosted or managed service where other people submit scenes or jobs to be rendered. Rendering for an organization and delivering the finished media to a client is allowed.

The license covers this version only. Voyager says later versions may come under different terms, including paid ones, though a change in later versions does not take away the rights to the version a user already has. Whatever is made with vork belongs to its maker; the license claims no rights in the scenes, code or media a user creates.

The caveats

The README is candid about what 0.1.0 does not do, and the list matters more than the feature set. Fog and participating volumes are ignored with warnings. Large scenes and dense transparency can fail, including on Mac, and lowering the resolution does not necessarily fix it. In the project's frozen sweep on Linux and NVIDIA, 583 of 585 images were delivered, and the million-stars stress scene ran out of GPU memory in both profiles.

The first render of a scene with new programs can take about three to four minutes to compile on NVIDIA and prints nothing while it does. Later renders take seconds. The path tracer is slower than Blender's Cycles in the measured cases, by 5.81 times on one 1080p still and 1.99 times on another. Simulation is limited: the water example is an experiment with finite particle budgets and no two-way rigid-body coupling. The Blender bridge fails during camera preparation on Blender 5.2.1, and the README notes that independent reproduction of its comparisons is not working.

On speed, the README says plainly that its timings are "not equal-quality speedups". Its default profile beat the retained EEVEE baselines by 1.38 times to 1.66 times on 1080p stills and by 1.14 times to 2.32 times on complete 240-frame movies, but vork renders fewer samples with denoising where EEVEE used 64 samples without it.

How to install and render a first scene

On Linux, install the NVIDIA driver first, then run the installer:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl tar libvulkan1 libgomp1 ffmpeg
curl -fL https://github.com/voyager-so/vork/releases/latest/download/install.sh -o /tmp/vork-install.sh
sh /tmp/vork-install.sh
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
vork --version
vork help

On Windows, install the NVIDIA driver and ffmpeg, then run the PowerShell installer install.ps1 from the same releases page. The installer verifies SHA256SUMS, installs under the user account without root, runs vork setup and adds vork to the PATH. On Windows, setup prints its report right away and then compiles for up to about three minutes with no output until "Shader setup completed"; that is not a hang.

Then open examples/first-scene.json to see the scene format and render it:

vork render shot.json --profile std/previs --out preview.png
vork render shot.json --profile std/final --out final.png

Use std/previs while iterating and std/final for delivery. From there, hand it to a coding assistant with the README's starting prompt: "Read vork help. Make a small scene, render a preview and inspect the image. Refine the camera and lighting before rendering at final quality. Read the relevant help topic when you need a feature the first page doesn't explain." For the composite, work from examples/vfx-artifact/, which adds the tracked camera, occlusion mattes and proxy geometry, and read vork help limits before committing to a shot.

What it could mean for creators

vork is a research preview with narrow hardware support and gaps in fog, volumes and simulation, so it is not a Blender replacement today. Voyager says so itself, and points motion-graphics work toward Remotion and HyperFrames instead. The conditional case is narrower. If an agent writes the shots and a scene needs custom light or simulation behavior, vork gives a shot that is rendered rather than generated, on a machine the creator already has, with every revision stored as readable code. For compositors who want 3D elements in real footage without a video model guessing the plate, that is the workflow vork models.

Get it from the voyager-so/vork repository: install with install.sh on Linux or macOS and install.ps1 on Windows, then paste the README's starting prompt, "Read vork help. Make a small scene, render a preview and inspect the image."