dave’s blog of art and programming

user generated content

A simple test filling arbitrary shapes with particles:

Code here

For no particular reason, I thought I’d have a go at writing a raytracer 100% in scheme (it actually started as a port of this which I wrote ages ago). I run it in the mzscheme interpreter for development and then compile it using stalin to render stuff. I’m hoping maybe it can serve as a framework for playing with some more esoteric rendering ideas in the future.

The code is here and while it’s not good enough for any general use yet, it supports all the usual raytracing stuff, plus obj file import and is partly integrated with this voxels renderer.

I’ve rewritten the experimental scheme voxel code into experimental C++ fluxus code, using hardware rendering for the sprite ’splat’ accumulation, which makes it realtime for 30×30x30 grids (27000 voxels).

The last two are a bunch of concentric spheres with the top left corner carved away by a box.

Part of the fun of this is figuring out a scene description language for volumetric data, currently you can create solid spheres or cubes, spherical influences from points, add/subtract them from each other, threshold and light them. Here’s a test with a million voxels, which surprisingly still leaves fluxus interactive, if not actually workable for realtime animations:

And a short movie of spheres carving each other up as they move around:

One day, when we have flying cars and people live on the moon, there will be no more triangles in computer graphics, only voxels. I somehow ended up spending the whole day today playing with the stalin scheme compiler and writing a small voxel renderer. These fuzzy blobs are the results: