Radioactive Mushrooms - Morphing 3D Fractals in Ray Tracing

[Alon Nahary]

Rendered by my Julia3D software, ray tracing mode, couple of minutes a frame.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/SecFyoLM27g&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/SecFyoLM27g&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

[Alon Nahary]

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[Alon Nahary]

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[Alon Nahary]

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[M Benesi]

  Good job on the shadows in your raytracer.  <-- seems like I'm saying this a lot recently.  What's up with all the good hard shadows???

[Alon Nahary]

Thanks!

I'll explain what I do:
For each ray I send from the camera location, I check if it hit the shape or hit the floor. In both cases, I send another ray towards the light. If this ray is blocked by the shape I get a shadowed point.

In addition, each pixel is checked for ambient occlusion. Old school, not too many shortcuts. For the quality in this clip I send 500 rays in random directions from each point, and measure how many are blocked by the shape or the floor.

At the end of the frame I smooth only the floor pixels. Three passes of smoothing gave me the best results; remove the noise and hard edges of the shadow, but still preserve the details.