I have been interested in Wada Basins for some time now. Wada Basins are the fractal like patterns that occur between touching reflective spheres. I finally got around to start adding support for GLSL into Visions Of Chaos. GLSL is the OpenGL Shading Language that allows you to use your graphics card processor (GPU) to do calculations that are magnitudes times faster than your CPU will ever be able to accomplish.
Here is a sample zoom sequence into a wada basin rendered using path tracing. Using the path tracing approach leads to global illumination with colors bleeding into nearby surfaces and soft shadows. If I was to even attempt to render these sort of images on the CPU alone this post would be months away, but harnessing the power of the GPU allowed these snapshots to be done in relatively no time at all.
The new version of Visions Of Chaos supporting GLSL will be out soon “when it’s ready”. I have meant to release it for a while now, but I keep adding new features and making changes.
Jason.
really “months” for an image that looks straight from a 386 running POV ray? I think you’ve had a bit much of nvidia’s kool aid
Hi Thomas,
Yes the “months” was a major exaggeration. The above images all were thanks to Eiffie at fractalforums posting a nice shader that I experimented with.
http://www.fractalforums.com/fragmentarium/inigo-quilez%27s-brute-force-global-illumination/
From my limited exposure and testing with GLSL so far the kool aid is starting to taste yummy. Why wouldn’t I have a sip when I can get incredible speedups?
Regards,
Jason.
I basically just wanted to make the point that 1. Intel do know what they’re doing and modern x86 CPUs are amazing, and that 2. until I see something a CPU couldn’t do, and much faster, I’m reserving judgement for the GPU being magic sauce
somewhat more usefully, it looks like you need some self intersection handling to stop that surface noise
I know you have been involved with some much more high end rendering packages. Indigo is way beyond this sort of thing I am doing.
If you have some time, I am sure Eiffie, myself and anyone else reading would be very appreciative to have your input in improving the shader code.
Jason.
The only issue I can directly see is the aforementioned “surface acne” problem, for which a classic workaround is to introduce a small epsilon check for self intersection when performing shadow ray queries.