POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Hello again : Re: Hello again Server Time
8 Jul 2024 10:15:57 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Hello again  
From: scott
Date: 2 Jul 2015 03:43:54
Message: <5594ebba$1@news.povray.org>
> Actually, among other things, I started getting into some 3D programming thanks
> to: a previously downloaded version of Fragmentarium (guidance); a C++ compiler
> & libs; GLSL documentation; POV docs. You know, raytracing via raymarching is
> actually a lot easier to achieve than traditional raytracing due to the fact
> that to make objects you pretty much just produce shape functions, and to render
> you increment a ray variably from the camera until you reach a function's
> threshold (as apposed to developing intersection functions for different shapes
> and using octree optimizations). There's more to it of course, but the point is
> it's simpler (to me anyway). Unfortunately, rendering on the GPU is much more
> limited due to video memory. But hey, real-time isosurfaces! Yeah!

Yes you can create some really cool effects that way, especially things 
like repetition essentially come for free. Being able to watch your CSG 
isosurface repeated off to infinity in every axis and be able to explore 
around it in real time is pretty cool.

I tinkered about using shadertoy.com as it allows you to write your 
shader code immediately without having to fuss about with pages and 
pages of C++ boiler-plate code just to get a blank screen rendered. Some 
people have made some amazing creations on there.

Also you can always write your raymarcher to run on the CPU, it won't be 
as fast but if you're running into memory troubles with a small GPU it 
might allow you to do things not possible otherwise.


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