Show HN: An otherworldly 3D scene in 16 kB of JavaScript

1 points by monokai_nl a year ago · 0 comments · 1 min read

(trigger warning: I know HN isn't keen on anything related to crypto, and this is crypto-art.)

Over the course of a couple of months this year I learned path tracing, signed distance fields, GLSL coding, and compacting JavaScript using a coding style you should never use in real life. But this all resulted in a system that can create "photo-realistic" 3D images of an otherworldly scene in 16000 bytes, no dependencies.

Monte Carlo path tracing is a very interesting technique, albeit very slow to render. It still amazes me how you can get a huge amount of variation and realistic lighting from a tiny amount of code that basically simulates millions of light rays bouncing around in a mathematically defined scene with some randomness applied.

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