Lights and Shadows
ciechanow.ski
Lights and Shadows
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Lights and Shadows
#2I think this is the most beautiful rendering explanation I've ever seen.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#3Looks really nice, the widgets are great and run well on my phone. Is it a real time ray tracer doing the rendering? Still amazes me these days what’s possible in browsers or on a phone.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#4So good!
Re: Lights and Shadows
#5The amount of care put into preparing this is amazing. The back-up lights even illuminate on the car when moving the slider backwards.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#6Looks really nice, the widgets are great and run well on my phone. Is it a real time ray tracer doing the rendering? Still amazes me these days what’s possible in browsers or on a phone.
> Still amazes me these days what’s possible in browsers or on a phone
I'm more amazed at the author, it doesn't even kick in the fans on my old MBP 2013! And even then, this is the least praise-worthy feature of the explorable explanation! I find the whole thing quite mindblowing. Congrats to the author.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#7I love the format of interactive educational documents, especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.
Check out the archives [1] for more amazing interactive documents by this author.
Can anyone share any more examples of this kind of thing? The OP's archives [1] are amazing.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#8Excellent example of where JavaScript really is useful!
Re: Lights and Shadows
#9I love the format of interactive educational documents, especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject. Check out the archives [1] for more amazing interactive documents by this author. Can anyone share any more examples of this kind of thing? The OP's archive…
https://distill.pub is such a platform for articles about machine learning
https://explorabl.es is a more general hub.
> especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.
Agreed. Unfortunately I think this is the inherent limitation to the explosion of such material (Bret's seminal essay [0] was almost a decade ago) - it takes an insane amount of skill, in mostly orthogonal disciplines, as well as a lot of time and effort to make it. Some tools attempt to make them a little straightforward to program, but due to the nature of it you can't really have a one size fits all solution that isn't just a general programming language + rendering engine.
And there is no "explorables industry" to fund the production of those (unlike say, textbooks), so it ends up being mostly side projects for otherwise gainfully employed developers.
It would be amazing to have eg. attempts at building an entire K-12 curriculum around explorable explanations. It's also the kind of work that probably loses in clarity and value when done by a team/committee rather than a single person dedicated to their vision.
Re: Lights and Shadows
#10Those are some well made demonstrations! Really intuitive and I think this would be a good theoretical starting point for anyone interested in computer graphics.
I think it should be clarified that with a real monochromatic cyan light source the tiles in this example [1] would be different hues of cyan, and not different hues of green, blue, and cyan (which is due to the cyan light source being modeled as a combination of green and blue light in the example).
