made a couple of test renders for a project and I’m really happy with how they turned out. with a fancy enough light simulation even the most basic materials can look good.

the reason for the weird aspect ratio is not that I’m making a forum signature banner, which they admittedly kinda look like, but that I got a big screen with said weird aspect ratio to mount on my wall and run generative art on. the original plan was to make it a fireplace running a bespoke fluid simulation, but I’ve been in more of a ray-trace-y than a fluid-simulate-y mood so this is the current direction.

the open question is whether I can trace rays fast enough to make this interactive: ideally I want to be able to walk by it or wave at it and have the scene react, otherwise it might as well just be a video loop. the screen isn’t too high-resolution, which is good, but that’s still a lot of rays, and even with the simpler diffuse scene (which needs ~2 bounces tops as opposed to like 5 for the glass one) it still might be dicey. got a lot more implementation work to do before that’ll be measurable though.