Wada Basins Part 2

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.

Saturn’s North Pole

It has been way too long since I posted a nice space related image. This entry on the Astronomy Picture Of The Day website pointed to this incredible photo of Saturn’s north pole.

More details about the image on the Casini Mission page.

Awesome science.

Jason.