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WebGL Path Tracing
- hebejebelus 15y agoThat's fantastic. I've been meaning to get into WebGL (perhaps make some sort of tech demo game with it). I've held off because of performance issues (also, I admit, I'm not too excited about dealing with shaders). I think I should stop procrastinating now and actually do something with it. This is very exciting!
- dualogy 15y agoShaders are fun! Looks a bit like "scary c++" at first but not too steep a learning-curve actually. No header files, pointers and the likes. Just a couple of maths functions and maths types (vec3, float etc). Pixel shaders return a "color" vector, vertex shaders a vertex "position" and "that's about it".
- hebejebelus 15y agoOh, really? That sounds eminently doable. Do you happen to have any fantastic resource for shaders?
- AndrewMoffat 15y agoThe OpenGL orange book has helped me tremendously http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMJYC4/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0321334892&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0YXCW3FNY9X3C7XNWSTN http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMJYC4/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...
- Groxx 15y agoWell, there's always http://nehe.gamedev.net/ http://nehe.gamedev.net/ or http://www.lighthouse3d.com/tutorials/glsl-tutorial/ http://www.lighthouse3d.com/tutorials/glsl-tutorial/
- daeken 15y agoI learned the basics of OpenGL from NeHe many years ago, and while things have gotten better, I can't recommend the site anymore. It's all written for old-school OpenGL (3 and below) and is generally a compendium of what you shouldn't do when writing OGL code. I still love it, but it's a bad resource for people new to OGL.
- gcr 15y agoWhat's better?
- daeken 15y agoThe Orange Book, Red Book, Lighthouse3d tutorials, and general experimentation. One nice thing about WebGL is that the cruft is largely gone, due to its ES parentage. This means that a lot of old tutorials are completely irrelevant, but that you can safely use just about everything without running into horrible practices. (Not that there aren't plenty of pitfalls left.)
- dualogy 15y agoLearn them together with WebGL -- I recommend "The Lessons" over at LearningWebGL.com very highly.
- hebejebelus 15y agoThat's a great site, thanks very much.
- dark_c 15y agoWarning: caused a complete system hangup here with Chrome 13 on Windows 7, Intel graphics.
- palish 15y agoWarning: This is incredibly epic, and worked fine for me. May cause heart attack due to awesomeness.
- Joe8Bit 15y agoNo problems for me at all. Chrome 14, Windows 7, nVidia graphics.
- barrydahlberg 15y agoChrome 13, Windows 7 - display driver (Intel Integrated) crashed but Windows managed to recover it. Intel graphics related issue maybe?
- jasonkostempski 15y agoExact same setup and experience for me.
- dualogy 15y agoSeems like a general WebGL issue -- I've seen most WebGL examples hang up or freeze on integrated graphics / Intel graphics but they always run absolutely smoothly on "full-blown" gamer-like GPUs (nVidia etc.) Unless your nVidia is on a MacBook but running Linux instead of OSX und thus odd drivers.
- sonnyz 15y agoWorked great for me until I switched tabs back to HN to read comments. My screens instantly went black while my video card driver thew up all over my desk.
- 4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs 15y agoup-to-date Chrome, Mac Lion - worked without causing any disturbance.
- timb 15y agoBeautiful... the fading grain as it renders is extremely pleasing.
- pstadler 15y agoIndeed, very polished. It's so awesome! Nice experience, very smooth (OSX/Radeon/FF5).
- davidwparker 15y agoFantastic use of WebGL. It's amazing how much can be done in browsers today. Also amazing how much it heats up my MBP!
- evilswan 15y agoWorks splendidly - 2011 MBP w/Radeon latest FF stable.
- azakai 15y agoWorks great here too, FF8 on Linux with NVidia drivers.
- ansonparker 15y agoThis is killer. Be sure to try dragging the scene/objects!
- ansonparker 15y agoFound a little easter egg. Enter javascript:ui.setObjects(makeRecursiveSpheres()) in the location bar with the page open and you'll really torture your graphics card.
- windsurfer 15y agoWorks great! Until I overloaded it. Made my graphic driver crash.
- crazygringo 15y agoThis is one of the coolest things I've seen all year, without exaggeration. The gradual rendering alone is new to me (and utterly fascinating), but the fact that diffuse lighting can be rendered in a browser... this completely redefines what I understand a browser to be capable of. Seriously amazing.
- aidenn0 15y agoIf you haven't seen path-tracing before, you should check out LuxRender: http://www.luxrender.net/ http://www.luxrender.net/ It's an open source unbiased renderer that uses similar techniques. It's a massively parallel problem, so the recent abilities to run general purpose code on a graphics accelerator has really been a huge boost to performance something like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70uNjjplYzA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70uNjjplYzA would have been impossible before CUDA came out.
- atilimcetin 15y agoamazing! converges very fast.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dewbot 15y agowell you should try http://www.3dtin.com http://www.3dtin.com too then
- jxcole 15y agoThis guy is an inspiration: http://madebyevan.com/about/ http://madebyevan.com/about/ I've been struggling to complete a web page app like this for a while, and he has finished several even though he's still in school.
- jak3px 15y agoLooks very promising. Congrats for the imp of the idea. Now I'll try to get out javascript/browser from the performance equation and see how it rocks.