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Thanks for all your work! This will be great for trying new functions. I remember my first renderer was brute force but not nearly with these results. Glad you gave it another look.

Great!

Currently I'm using accumulative fixed-step raymarching for trying out weird 3D formulas without using a DE, like in this "3D-rotated Julia" :



But I always wanted a solid shader for formulas without DE, and I was thinking of modifying your fragmentarium default raytracer to do this (or at least trying to).

I'm glad you already did it, and that it works so good! Can't wait to try it.

I think it could.  I already found that a stratified approach, where the camera ray segment is divided into equal pieces and a sample is choosen from each part reduces noise. You could also probably gain speed by sampling closer to the found solution. Since I use  double buffered progressive rendering approach, at the start of each frame, I could actually read the adjacent pixel depth and sample closer to these. On the other hand, if you bias the search you are probably more like to miss subtle details closer to the camera.

Also the function I use for random numbers:

is quite primitive, and will show visible artifacts. There is no easy solution in GLSL here: I probably should use a precalculated texture with random values (I do have a floating point texture loader), but I'm too lazy.


I know :-) Actually I decided to try this, because I saw that you were able to succesfully use brute-force fixed step rendering on your great volumetric renders. The worst part about these brute-force solids, is that you need to rely on screen space lighting - this introduces artifacts: e.g. when you do tile rendering you get visually transitions near the border of the tiles.


Yes, it seems to the same approach - I just don't choose a fixed step size, so there no bounds to the resolution: the image will converge towards the true set.

Just to make it clear: brute force ray tracing is not a novel idea - it was indeed the simplest method I could think of. What is perhaps surprising, is that it is fast enough to achieve interactive frame rates on a GPU.

Wow! I've always wanted to test brute force renders of the mandelbulb "to see what it REALLY looks like".
The mandelbulb you rendered have such beautiful details Syntopia.
Got to try out fragmentarium again!

And shouldn't this randomized brute force method be effective for robust computation of inside views? It wouldn't be as fast, of course, since most samples iterate to the limit, but perhaps still fast enough.

nice, i like it very much, this way it is far more easier to try out hillarious new functions, thx for keeping the program in steady development!

Back in my early programming experiences, I developed a random number generator based on irrational numbers... I'll try to remember how it worked, but I think the single precision limitation could be a problem.