Rollercoaster escape

[marius]

Typical -1.77 box, iteration count from 23 down to 13. Attempt at dynamic lowering of iteration count to avoid having just noise in the distance.
Hacked up boxplorer and fragment.glsl to do splining and the LoD.

The strategy for the LoD I tried with the GPU pixel shader is:
- do DE at full iteration count (23 in this case).
- depending on distance, pick a lower iteration count,
  move the eye 80% along the ray and render pixel with lower iteration count (to avoid rendering expanding nearby objects on that ray).
With some tuning of min_dist and range of iteration count that produces stable images. Some black pixels due to poking into the fractal, but much better than all dust in the background. Slows down rendering a bit but still very acceptable, couple fps for 1080p. Haven't mapped a coloring scheme to it yet, so currently color is pretty much function of distance between red and green..

Still have some stutters (sloppy keyframes w/ wildly varying eyedistance/speed) and a toxic color scheme but the 3D effects w/o the Youtube compression artifacts look awesome on my 3d tv.

(watch on youtube.com for various 3D rendering options, and in HD.. their embedded player doesn't understand 3D (yet?))

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/lvMl7y4edMY&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/lvMl7y4edMY&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

[gussetCrimp]

Absolutely fracking beautiful! I watched it using the "parallel" option, completely naturally, easily and unobtrusively - which means you could do a "normally" coloured version, too, that would work just as well for parallel viewing as this red/green version. The bits where you run along the "tracks" are super effective. Man this box is an amazing find, and seeing it in 3D really brings out its amazingness. Thank you! I would love to see another one in realistic colours.

[marius]

Absolutely fracking beautiful! I watched it using the "parallel" option, completely naturally, easily and unobtrusively - which means you could do a "normally" coloured version, too, that would work just as well for parallel viewing as this red/green version. The bits where you run along the "tracks" are super effective. Man this box is an amazing find, and seeing it in 3D really brings out its amazingness. Thank you! I would love to see another one in realistic colours.

Glad you liked it. It's a bit of a tech demo, the red/green is not because of the 3d but because I have been messing with the rendering engine and the regular color mapping onto the fractal surface fails. Instead of shimmering color bands, for now I color purely based on distance, mixing from near red to far green. Works pretty well for the innards, not so hot for the outside views.

I wonder whether the distance based coloring does provide cues for your brain to interpret the stereoscopy, in addition to the left/right eye separation. Might allow for more extreme perspective tweaking? But fog probably achieves the same.

Yeah, the rollercoasting is my fav part too, works great for stereoscopic viewing.
I'll do some more, once I get the kinks ironed out regarding keyframe editing, and perhaps the coloring.
I thinking sticking to the inner rollercoaster parts, jumping from rails to bowls to rails in a mad, yet 'realistic' feeling loop ;-)