peter nitsch.net

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Getting into the Christmas spirit, I thought I’d play around with raytracing reflective spheres to produce the fractal known as Wada basins. It’s an old technique that can be easily reproduced physically by using four mirrored Christmas ornaments stacked in a pyramid. To be honest, the idea came from seeing the mirrorball Ralph picked up to use as a lightmap for Triangle3D.

I bought a set of mirrored ornaments for our tree and set them up in a pyramid:

The fractal appears through the center:

I’ve been wanting to write a simple raytracer (the Alchemy version I posted a while back was a port of PixelMachine) in pure AS3 for some time. This experiment marks the first steps towards that goal. You can check out the source code. It’ll grow over time as I clean up the structure and add optimizations.

The first AS3 test draws the image line by line to avoid some serious stack overflows. Camera positions, lighting, reflectivity, and other values can easily be changed within the source. I’ll draft an API over time. The result is a 4K swf:

An Alchemy version of the same logic achieved much faster render speeds (minus the line drawing), but the resultant swf was well over 100k:

An attempt at simple interaction with the Alchemy version:

1000×1000 pixel render:

The next step will be to write a WebGL version and compare it to the Flash speeds.