Bunch of questions / ideas

[Patryk Kizny]

I am working on a bunch of features for further updates of the raytracer.

Thinking about adding raytraced refractions, but before getting down to coding I wanted to check with some of more experienced guys here.
I remember I've read somewhere that DE is usually not very well defined insider fractals. Is that true? That would be a condition to ray through the body in a straightforward way.
The other option that is coming to my mind straight off is to extend the ray quite far and shoot in backward direction. that wouldn't be easy for porous stuff though.
Ideas?


The second thing I am recently considering is modifying 'my' raytracer so that it has an alternate bruteforce tracing method and perhaps - a hybrid one. That would allow for rendering way more crazy marriages between height maps, fractals and hybrid fractals. Looking at some examples brute does not seem slow on GPUs. That could be a good step before digging into bringing some of the crazy hybrid formulas implemented in mandelbulb and recoding these for Frag/Synth.

Any thoughts?

Next step is I want to add multi-material support (weird, cause I have a feeling I've already done that at some point - too much mess going between computers and frag/synthclipse).
I also wanted to add some sort of global illumination or at least simplified version of it for more realistic colors on cheap.

Last crazy idea that I had was to do some sort of a hybrid between vertex shaders and fragment shaders via glDepth. I was thinking about importing some geometry, rasterizing with the same camera and just using depth to intersect/obscure fractal stuff. Useful for real matte objects and perhaps other applications.

What are your other feature wishes for the raytracer?

[Crist-JRoger]

Making it work so fast as WebGL     
Would like to as a result see full environment. And super quick godrays too 

_{Эх мечты-мечты...}

[Patryk Kizny]

Making it work so fast as WebGL. Would like to as a result see full environment. And super quick godrays too 

My changes are rather going opposite way - adding features → going slower → requiring more power.
I am developing it mostly as a tool for creating pre-rendered visuals. But there are faster retracers bundled with Fragmentarium if you need it.

[Crist-JRoger]

- Create particle system with small details (maybe rain, snow, dust, flocks of birds or sand), it would be very slower I think
- More post-effects like lens flares
- "Natural" and more bokeh...
Appetite comes with eating  

upd. I have an idea for creating pseudo-random sets. Shoals of fish, flocks of birds, leaves from trees, etc.