Mar 2021
Made with Processing
This was one of my first forays into ray marching, which is a rendering technique that is often used in tandem with signed distance functions (SDFs).
Rather than define the world in triangles (which is more typical), SDFs define geometry through math functions that tell you the distance from the surface of the object. SDFs can be combined with mathematical operations, which allows for some interesting effects that would be much harder to do using traditional meshes.
Although ray marching works differently from other rendering styles, certain elements are pretty similar, such as diffuse and specular shading under the Phong model.
This entire project was done in Processing on the CPU, so each pixel was rendered one-by-one. This led to the runtimes being rather slow and there being tons of aliasing artifacts. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience, and helped me fully understand the intuition behind ray marching and SDFs.