Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
PROGRAMMING => General coding questions => Topic started by: Raizor on April 21, 2012
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I've been playing around with ray marching again and it got me thinking about a scene modeller for ray marching. Do you think people like Psycho have an own made tool like this for creating procedural gfx compo entries or would they be done by hand?
I'm toying with the idea of having a go at a basic modeller (in breaks from synth coding) as I think it would be a fun and hopefully useful tool. As scenes get more complex, realtime animation may go out of the window but I can see it being pretty cool for making logos for size limited productions or other things.
Has anyone come across anything like this before?
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Yes, if I uderstood you right, someone has posted something like this before. I remember I really liked the aproach, it saved the modelling operations and their order instead of the finished models themselves.
It should be floating around the boards here somewhere, I'll see if I can find it.
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Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking of Kirl. I had a quick search and couldn't find it.
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Found it: http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php?topic=4853.msg65339 :)
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Ah Qoob! Thanks Kirl.
I've come across this before. As far as I'm aware though, it's polygon based modelling. It seems it stores the steps to create a polygon model ad the library then recreates the model using the steps when the intro is run. That's my understanding anyway.
Neat stuff though. Have some Karma for searching for me, cheers.
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That's my understanding of it as well, what are you thinking of exactly?
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I'm thinking in terms of modelling using distance functions (http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm).
With a few basic primitives and a few modifier operations and deformations, you could make some pretty neat stuff. You could also define a fairly complex object using a bunch of primitives and modifiers and then just instance it in your scene. Could be quite neat imo :)
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Ah, I see what you mean! I'm actually quite familiar with it as Cinema4d makes a clear distinction between procedural and poly objects. I guess all 3d software makes use of both at some point, but AFAIK the distiction isn't as pronounced. I believe C4d is (was?) unique in that you can switch between the NURBS (smoothed high "poly") model and the low poly base model at any time.
I can definitely confirm you can do some really cool stuff with deforms and booleans etc on primitives without ever seeing a single polygon.
I say go for it! :cheers: