Today I played around with a technique for combining different distance functions. It proved quite an effective way of producing interesting planet-like objects, among other things. Here are a few variations I encountered through experimentation: The middle panel looks like it would make a nice piece of album cover art.
Author Archives: Andrew Caudwell
Inventing On Principle Applied to Shader Editing
Recently I have been playing around with GLSL Sanbox (github), a what-you-see-is-what-you-get shader editor that runs in any WebGL capable browser (such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari). It gives you a transparent editor pane in the foreground and the resulting compiled fragment shader rendered behind it. Code is recompiled dynamically as the code changes. The [...]
Raycasting Planets
Some images of a planet render I made a while ago: The scene is drawn inside a fragment shader. The clouds and nebulars are raycast spheres textured with an IFS fractal function, also used to generate the terrain.
Remixing Distance Fields
Last year I got fairly obsessed with distance field raycasting and fractals. Recently a few developments in that field have rekindled my interest in the whole phenomenon. Most of the people playing around with the Mandelbulb and it’s variants back in early 2010 were either mathematicians or graphics programmers, and while there were some technically [...]
Show Your True Colours
This last week saw the release of fairly significant update to Gource – replacing the out dated, 3DFX-era rendering code, with something a bit more modern, utilizing more recent OpenGL features like GLSL pixel shaders and VBOs. A lot of the improvements are under the hood, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is the [...]
New Zealand Open Source Awards
I discovered today that Gource is a finalist in the Contributor category for the NZOSA awards. Exciting stuff! A full list of nominations is here. I’m currently taking a working holiday to make some progress on a short film presentation of Gource for the Onward!. Update: here’s the video presented at Onward!: Craig Anslow presented [...]
Life is Strange
Here is my tribute to a fascinating new fractal I talked about in an earlier post, the Mandelbulb. (Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3x4uJJqs_w) The music in the video is ‘Life is strange (trance remix)’ by darkangell. I recorded the scenes using my work in progress Mandelbulb Viewer/Fly through builder application (which is on my github, if you’re curious). [...]
New Logstalgia Released
I’ve just released a new version of Logstalgia, my website access log visualization that looks a bit like Pong if only it had been created by Jeff Minter. Logstalgia is also referred to as ApachePong (referring to both the Apache Web Server and Pong) which is a much better name, but also covered by multiple [...]
Linux.Conf.Au 2010
Last week I attended Linux Conf Australia, the annual conference for all things Open Source down under, this year held in Wellington, New Zealand, the city where I live. I was very lucky to get the opportunity to organize some of the displays at the conference. An application developed for the conference displayed information such [...]
Strange Alien Vistas
I’ve been messing around with a new fractal discovered only a few months ago dubbed The Mandelbulb. It has similar interesting visual properties to its forebear, the Mandelbrot fractal, but in three dimensions, which hadn’t been achieved until now. Here are a few non-typical renderings of the Mandelbulb taken very close to the surface that [...]
