A mere five years *cough* after the first idea for monopolar spherical coordinates ... and after a mere three months *cough* of computation time, here is finally a very detailed - and colorful! - look at the Riemandelettuce. It might have been new and interesting if I had presented it five years earlier, but now it is still a sixty second loop of mildly exotic eye candy:
http://vectorizer.org/rmdltc/AutumnTrappingsHD01.mp4(It might take a while to download to 80MB from my humble virtual server, so you better save to your local disk before playback.)
The object is the Riemandelettuce (that apparently I'm still obsessed with), rendered with a heavily evolved version of Syntopia's brute force ray sampling. Color comes from two spherical orbit traps, and lighting is again based on Syntopia's description of a simple screen space fake of ambient occlusion. Furthermore, I used 3x3 supersampling to capture the detail at an iteration depth of ten (unfortunately I forgot to gamma-correct here, but only noticed it halfway through the computation; so the anti-aliasing is not as effective as it could be).
There is still a bit of flicker at the outlines of very thin structures, but that is a fundamental problem of brute force ray sampling.
May 23, 2013, 10:24:09 AM
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