Syntopia | Generative Art, 3D Fractals, Creative Computing

The idea behind this post goes back to a Fractal Forums discussion back in 2012, where Knighty came up with a clever scheme for ray marching polytopes. It also discusses the mathematics behind Jenn 3D (a tool for creating explicit geometry).
It is probably my most ambitious post yet – lots of interactive WebGL components – which also means it not very mobile friendly, I’m afraid....

‘Strange Attractors’ is an experiment I did a couple of months ago: https://syntopia.github.io/StrangeAttractors
It renders Strange Attractors using WebGL, and can export high resolution PNG’s and OBJ/STL 3D objects.
Chrome is strongly preferred, and a good GPU helps as well....

In some ways path tracing is one of the simplest and most intuitive ways to do ray tracing.
Imagine you want to simulate how the photons from one or more light sources bounce around a scene before reaching a camera. Each time a photon hits a surface, we choose a new randomly reflected direction and continue, adjusting the intensity according...

I have written a lot about distance estimated ray marching using OpenGL shaders on this blog.
But one of the things I have always left out is how to setup the camera and perspective projection in OpenGL. The traditional way to do this is by using functions such as ‘gluLookAt’ and ‘gluPerspective’. But things become more...