Hi everybody,
here's an effect inspired by
monkey, a winamp-plugin by Ryan Geiss.
Unlike the original, I wanted to give it a more "realistic" look with smoother surface, proper texturing and a more organic touch.
I already wanted to try this for years, but never really found time until yesterday.
The implementation was pretty straight forward, I did the geometry-generation (including parameter tweaking) yesterday evening and - 1st of may is holiday here
- a *very* simple texture-generator with gui today.
So what it does is twirling a set of intersecting pipes into a volume (effectively a 64x64x128 grid) and generating the iso-surface using a marching cubes algorithm.
The shading is done by simple vertex-coloring using some kind of local ambient-occlusion approach - since I got the volume-grid anyway, I simply look for potential occluders in the vertex' surrounding.
Texturing is done using one simple generated 2D texture which is mapped from all three canonical axes and blended over at the cross-sections - which works pretty well as long as the texture has rather low contrast.
Since this is done at per-pixel-level it requires ps 2.0 to run (actually it *would* work with ps 1.1 but glsl doesn't really support those).
The texture itself is generated from a set of differently coloured and blended plasmaclouds (and looks like
this).
When I have some spare time again, I will definetly try to improve it, as it still looks somewhat too ... generated.
But since this will probably not happen before the end of the challenge, I'm already posting it now.
I didn't go for much size-optimizing here, but then again it isn't actually big either.
At the moment the source is probably way too messy to be of any use, but if anyone is interested in details, I'm willingly telling.
Enjoy.
If, for whatever reason, it won't run on your machine,
here is a video, too.
Also attached a shot of the current texture (downsampled, "actual size" is 2048x2048).
