An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#1

Post by c-st » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:48 PM UTC

An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching
ch-st.de

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#2

Post by samus » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 9:50 AM UTC

The first paragraphs contain the most concise explanation of the differences between rasterization and ray tracing I ever encountered!

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#3

Post by nickdothutton » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

Nice work. Reminds me of some of the work of Pete Cooke of Tau Ceti and Academy fame on 8-bit platforms.

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#4

Post by tobr » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

Very cool, great visual explanations of how raymarching works.

PSA, Germans writing in English: upside down quotes look as out of place as Spanish question marks! They read like two strange misplaced commas to the rest of us.

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#5

Post by pdkl95 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

I ported it to aalib. Instead of a 7 character linear ramp, the aalib version renders to a larger framebuffer, dithers it down to the closes matching characters.

https://gist.github.com/pdkl95/094cc065ab0215e121da29a63e6c1...

        ajWm##Xs,
      aWWWWBm##S2s,
     jQQWQWWmm#XXov,
    _QQQQWWBBm#ZX2n(
    ]QQQWWWBmm#XXovl
    4WWWWWmmm#XX2ovi`
    ]mBBmmmm#XXXonl|
     ###m##ZZXSonI|`
     -XZZZXXXonvI|~
       "Xo2onvvi+`
         -"^^~~

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#6

Post by podiki » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

Very cool! Reminds me of the old days of ASCII art, I think I last saw it mostly on warez readmes (some really impressive ones)

Edit: I love the combo of ray marching and fonts too [0], as previously seen on HN [1]

[0] https://www.rykap.com/2020/09/23/distance-fields/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569542

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#7

Post by smcameron » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

Reminds me of two other things:

* https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html * https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfu...

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#8

Post by wcarss » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

Great post! This motivated more learning for me about ray-tracing and ray-marching than I've ever bothered with, despite over a decade of vague interest.

If anyone wants a copy, I ported the diffuse shader code to python 2 and 3 here: https://gist.github.com/wcarss/a6ff897fb9c50ac34875dbd5d8599...

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#9

Post by philzook » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

I love it. It's brilliant to side step the whole issue of how to get access to pixels on your screen or in a png, which in some instances is an awful afternoon of frustration. It's almost always easy to get printing going.

Re: An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching

#10

Post by a1k0n » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

smcameron wrote: post #7

Reminds me of two other things: * https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html * https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfu...

https://github.com/a1k0n/asciitracing sort of combines those things also