Marching Rays amongst shit jokes

Get introduced to raymarching, a rendering-technique extensively used by the demoscene to create complex, high detailed visuals. Leave the traditional polygons and materials behind and dive into procedural shapes, distance fields, blending and distortion methods.

Historically emerged in a medical context from computed tomography (CT) scanners in the 1970s, raymarching is adapted for computational image synthesis in real-time. As a complex rendering technique with many benefits over the established approaches, it is used to render high-quality images of solid 3d objects.

It extends the graphical expression of artists and delivers super efficient solutions, when being confronted with specific scopes like heightfields (to simulate surface displacement on traditional rasterized geometry) or implicit functions (for rendering things like fractals).

What happened in the workshop?

Me and princeMio marched our pet rays in an environment full of shit jokes.
(We were modelling and rendering raymarching distance fields in real-time using vvvv and HLSL shader code.)

Who was the target audience of the workshop?

Graphic geeks who are not afraid of sharks or seeing Pedro wearing a bikini.

What did attendees of the workshop learn?

  • How to render and model distance fields ray marching, while retaining all your customer based interaction protocols and maximizing your revenues (sorry i went business mode at the end).
  • How to texture said geometries with more pixel shading, UV mapping, material index, or your nan’s holyday pics…
  • How to composite raymarched geometries with normal polygonal geometries using depth…
  • How to look cool while Pedro points at you from the stands and asks you to Tango.

So what? 

Modeling with distance functions

 

Mangosh Prunier

evvvvil

Creative Coder, Developer, Educator, Media Designer, Performer, Technologist

vimeo.com/evvvvil

Part-time marine biologist exploring the relationship between fake beards and boating shoes in pirate films of the post-Spielberg era.

Influenced by 90s skateboarding and neo-dadaist anti-social behavior.

Synthesizing the poetry of football hooliganism in Newtonian apple juice, distilling art until the cow goes “moo”.

Fascinated by the unrelenting classicism of fruits shaped like genitalia and its radical influence on northern French cook books.

As the beans are spilt onto the lap of angels and confusion reins among those who get to eat the last broken sausage, only one’s critical questioning of the nature of this banana is the key to hope and superhuman transcendence, bro.

Christian Loclair

Artist, Creative Coder, Designer

Germany

princemio.net

Christian Loclair investigated interactive dance and media scenarios.

As a solo battle dancer he became the winner of the „International Battle of the year 2007“, the Ruhrpott Battle 2007 and the Wutal Battle in 2008 (Pina Bausch Festival) to name only a few. In 2007 and 2010 he was chosen to represent Germany at the UK Bboy World championship.

Christian is also known as a contemporary theatre choreographer and media-engineer. His work is mainly focused on combining media technologies and performative art. He choreographed the dance piece marionettes (2006), reflection (2007) and co-choreographed 110(2008) and Pow_2045 (2014).

He studied Computer Science at the University Potsdam, specializing in Media Engineering (Prof. Dr. Klaus Rebensburg) and Human Computer Interaction (Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch).

Since 2012 he was able to collaborate with onformative, a studio for generative design melting art, science and interactive media. In collaboration with onformative he implemented the experimental tool pathfinder, to investigate generative concepts within the field of choreography.