Trier Raycaster Hi-Res Screenshots

Runs fullscreen (1680x1050px) on my MacPro, at realtime framerates.
I will still attempt to optimise a little though, as it’s slowish on my (admittedly ageing) laptop.

GPU Raycasting Now Working

Finally got it to work!
So, here’s Borg and Blob surfaces rendered in a GPU-accelerated GLSL raycaster shader:

As you can see, there’s a certain graininess to the render. This I actually quite like. It can be smoothed-out by decreasing the step-length that each ray is incremented by, but this slows down render times exponentially.

Obviously, there’s no lighting calculation being done, and I’m not working out normals at all. I quite like the ghostly quality you get from this simple opacity-accumulation-style render though.

Thanks once again to Peter Trier for sharing his method, and I’d also like to thank Viktor N. Latypov for his encouragement on this project.

Here’s a clip of the shader at work on a Blob surface. I’ve added some colour to the rendering by mixing-in the ray XYZ-position as RGB colour, to add a bit of interest to the volume.

..and the Borg surface:

And this time, modulating the ray’s start position with live video input:

GPU Raycasting

First attempt at implementing Peter Trier’s simple raycasting setup as an isosurface renderer. It’s definitely not working as it should, but it’s looking interesting, anyway.

Here it’s rendering a Borg isosurface, from Paul Bourke’s site.