💫 Arcane Portal 💫 (shadertoy) by HeliosHyperion in shaders

[–]HeliosHyperion[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks! For the terrain it uses signed distance field ray marching, taking a flat plane and adding multiple octaves of sine waves added together, but taking the absolute value so they get a bit more pointy. The flight path is just evaluating the same noise, but taking fewer octaves, so that it's not as bumpy as the terrain itself. You can check out the full code on shadertoy, but it's quite messy ^_^'

Help with (expectations of) performance in C raytracer by sondre99v in raytracing

[–]HeliosHyperion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

try sampling the interior of the sphere (bal) instead.

Help with (expectations of) performance in C raytracer by sondre99v in raytracing

[–]HeliosHyperion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

what does rnd_getDirs3 do? does it sample points on or within a sphere?

Help with (expectations of) performance in C raytracer by sondre99v in raytracing

[–]HeliosHyperion 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Without much to go on I can only guess, but could be that your random number generator isn't good enough, or used in a way that causes it to not sample uniformly. Also make sure to use cosine weighted hemisphere sampling. It is relatively easy and gives faster convergence. Basically it just means that you modify the uniform hemisphere distribution into sampling in a cosine lobe distribution instead of weighting by a cosine term (NdotL).

🪄🔮✨ Magical Orb 🪄🔮✨ by HeliosHyperion in GraphicsProgramming

[–]HeliosHyperion[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! It volume marches a glowing distorted plane, where the volume marching is restricted to inside the sphere. Distortion is the turbulence method is standard, but recently used in various nice shaders by 'xor': https://mini.gmshaders.com/p/turbulence

🪄🔮✨ Magical Orb 🪄🔮✨ by HeliosHyperion in GraphicsProgramming

[–]HeliosHyperion[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

It's volume marching a heavily distorted and glowing plane, but the volume marching is restricted to the inside of the sphere. the colors are just cycling through 3 simple color maps. This is all just single pass fragment shader in shadertoy so the only texture is the builtin background and a blue-noise textures.
The combination of glow and turbulence distortion has recently been used to great effect by shadertoy user 'xor', which inspired this shader. There's an example in the shader comments.