In some ways path tracing is one of the simplest and most intuitive ways to do ray tracing. Imagine you want to simulate how the photons from one or more light sources bounce around a scene before reaching a camera. Each time a photon hits a surface, we choose a new randomly reflected direction and … Continue reading Path Tracing 3D Fractals
This is the last post in my introduction to distance estimated 3D fractals (see Part one for an overview). Originally, I intended this to be much shorter and more focused, but different topics kept sneaking up on me. This final post discusses hybrid systems, and a few things that didn’t fit naturally in the previous … Continue reading Distance Estimated 3D Fractals (Part VIII): Epilogue
I’ve released a new build of Fragmentarium, version 0.9 (“Sun Ra”). Download at Github. (As of now only Windows builds are available) New features New high resolution output dialog (with auto-naming and auto-backup of scripts and parameters) Locking of parameters (makes rendering considerably faster in some cases by turning uniforms into constants) Minor improvements Mouse … Continue reading Fragmentarium 0.9 Released
Previous posts: part I, part II, part III and part IV. The last post discussed the distance estimator for the complex 2D Mandelbrot: (1) , with ‘dr’ being the length of the running (complex) derivative: (2) In John Hart’s
The previous posts (part I, part II) introduced the basics of rendering DE (Distance Estimated) systems, but left out one important question: how do we create the distance estimator function? Drawing spheres Remember that a distance estimator is nothing more than a function, that for all points in space returns a length smaller than (or … Continue reading Distance Estimated 3D Fractals (III): Folding Space
The first post discussed how to find the intersection between a camera ray and a fractal, but did not talk about how to color the object. There are two steps involved here: setting up a coloring scheme for the fractal object itself, and the shading (lighting) of the object. Lights and shading Since we are … Continue reading Distance Estimated 3D Fractals (II): Lighting and Coloring
A slight digression from the world of fractals and generative art: This post is about drawing high-quality graphs of high-frequency functions. Yesterday, I needed to draw a few graphs of some simple functions. I started out by using Iñigo Quilez’s nice little GraphToy, but my functions could not be expressed in a single line. So … Continue reading Plotting High-frequency Functions Using a GPU.
During the last two years, the 3D fractal field has undergone a small revolution: the Mandelbulb (2009), the Mandelbox (2010), The Kaleidoscopic IFS’s (2010), and a myriad of equally or even more interesting hybrid systems, such as Spudsville (2010) or the Kleinian systems (2011). All of these systems were made possible using a technique known … Continue reading Distance Estimated 3D Fractals (Part I)
For some time I’ve been wanting to play around with pixel (fragment) shaders, but I couldn’t find a proper playground. Then I stumbled upon Shader Toy, by Inigo Quilez (whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). A couple of things make Shader Toy stand out: It runs inside your browser. It uses the emerging … Continue reading Shader Toy
Some links to Generative Art, Math & Fractals, and other creative ways of creating computional imagery. The list is not meant to be exhaustive: rather, it is a list of my favorite links. Generative Art Software General-Purpose Software Processing is probably the most used platform for Generative Art. It is an “open source programming language … Continue reading Generative Art Links