And if you want to try things out yourself, iq has created a playground for you here: https://www.shadertoy.com/
and one similar to Elevated
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGD4
Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#12Could someone explain to me what the "two triangles that cover the entire screen area" have to do with anything?
It basically means everything is happening in the shaders, not in geometry. There has to be some vertexes though, and the minimum you can have to cover the screen is two triangles.
That is incorrect. You can cover the screen with a single triangle ... just make it big enough. The corners get clipped and the middle region of the big triangle will cover the screen.
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#13Ah, the classic presentation that got me started in the demoscene a couple of years back. The Google cache version of the pdf doesn't include any images, so I put up a copy over here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2173295/rwwtt.pdf
Thanks for the mirror. Know of any novel techniques/rehashing of old techniques that have been developed since?
Well, for very small intros (4k/8k) distance fields are still hard to beat due to their compactness. A couple of examples not based on distfields, off the top of my head:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62027 (No idea what this is, but it's great)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62974 (reverse fluid simulation)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59613 (particles)
For 64k intros and size unlimited demos the possibilities are too many to list. Procedural mesh generation is a classic approach which has found great modern use recently:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61204 (if you follow 1 link in this comment make it this one)
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
It basically means everything is happening in the shaders, not in geometry. There has to be some vertexes though, and the minimum you can have to cover the screen is two triangles.
That is incorrect. You can cover the screen with a single triangle ... just make it big enough. The corners get clipped and the middle region of the big triangle will cover the screen.
You can get around the clipping problem by displaying it on an old Interocitor.
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#15I love these.
People might enjoy noodling around the Geisswerks pages which have many code snippets around ray tracing; graphic demos; and so on.
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It basically means everything is happening in the shaders, not in geometry. There has to be some vertexes though, and the minimum you can have to cover the screen is two triangles.
That is incorrect. You can cover the screen with a single triangle ... just make it big enough. The corners get clipped and the middle region of the big triangle will cover the screen.
True, both approaches are equally valid and being used. Every once in a while some gfx haxors also spend baffling amounts of effort on humorously "benchmarking" both approaches against each other.. ;)
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#17I was working with distance fields back in 2008, and the idea of inverting the process blew my mind.
I had no idea Iñigo Quilez's image was produced this way and I'm so glad I had the chance to see how it was made.
Thanks for posting!!
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#18I think the most elegant thing about this method is that it describes a scene in terms of its basic mathematical 3D objects and transformations on them (list here: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfun... ) and then exploits the massive parallelism of the GPU for rendering all the pixels.
Here's a demo of someone playing around with it, complete with a Slisesix-inspired scene: http://www.rpenalva.com/blog/?p=254
This set of slides is also related: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function...
Re: Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles on the GPU [pdf]
#19Is the demoscene a good place to get into graphics programming? The prevalence of older methods leads me to believe one could learn in a similar progression to the graphics gurus of today, moving from simpler old methods with performance and size optimization to modern techniques?