stephan mantler More »

Unintended Beauty

Sometimes bugs or debug tests produce nice pictures, as in this case, which turned some random test data into a cool, semi-crystallized picture. I guess I’ll have to save those shaders just in case. For the reference, this one is supposed to do tangent space displacement mapping through ray tracing, but instead of writing out the final color it color codes some internal variables. As you see, debugging doesn’t have to be all about poring over countless lines of code

By the way, I’m playing with RenderMonkey now just to see how it compares to FX Composer. It has quite a different approach to shader development than FX Composer and took me a while to get my bearings, but I am beginning to like it.

How do you plan to make your raytracing ? Step by step, or do you have a specific space traversal algorithm ?
Also, be aware of the problem of finding the entry point and exit point of your displacement volume with arbitrary meshes, it’s not as easy as it could seems !
Anyway good luck and keep posting about it

The space traversal algorithm is a bit different than the standard methods, mostly because the ultimate goal (and geometry) is quite specific and I intend to exploit this fact to take a few shortcuts for better speed. Same goes for calculating exact entry and exit points. Which, by the way, can easily be found for arbitrary convex objects at the cost of an extra render-to-texture pass of the back facing polygons. I can’t really go into too much detail about our stuff because it is part of a research publication that we are currently writing.

The displacement mapper works already, by the way, but we’re trying various creative things to get as much speed out of it as possible