is a generative art piece designed and engineered in a fragment shader via GLSL.
The piece you see is unique to you!
Reloading this page will generate a new piece.
The shader was engineered based on Peter Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend series, focusing on integrating a global illumination path tracer, parallelized per pixel on the GPU.
The piece leverages features such as diffuse and dielectric materials, global illumination, texture mapping, Fractional Brownian Motion, and progressive rendering to create a scene with a noisy glass ball.
The value to sample the Fractial Brownian Motion and glass color are the generative elements of the piece and are what allowed me to express the computational simulation as a piece of art.
Progressive rendering was by far one of my favorite features to integrate!
It allows for the accumulation of noisy (low quality) renders to then be averaged to make a high quality image. A new noisy render is calculated every frame, which means that every frame the quality of the piece improves.
You can tell when you refresh the page that the piece starts noisy, and quickly improves in quality from there.
I find it really cool that you can accumulate many low quality simulations that are very easy to compute to average and create a high quality result.