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Life & fun · July 4, 2023

Iridescent crystal with raymarching and signed distance fields

When building a 3D scene using libraries such as Three.js we generally use meshes. You define a geometry attach some material to it to…

Iridescent crystal with raymarching and signed distance fields launched on July 4, 2023 with 159 votes, #265 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

Visit varun.ca ↗Alternativestop 6% of July 2023

In plain words

Iridescent Crystal is a visual demonstration tool created by Varun that uses raymarching and signed distance field techniques to render an interactive crystal with color-shifting properties. It's designed for people interested in 3D graphics programming and visual effects. The project stands out for its technical implementation of advanced rendering methods that create realistic lighting and refraction effects on crystalline structures.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

When building a 3D scene using libraries such as Three.js we generally use meshes. You define a geometry attach some material to it to create a mesh. Then add that mesh to the scene to render it. This is also how 3D modelling software like Blender and Cinema4D work. However, in the demoscene world—where the goal of is to create stuff using extremely small and self-contained computer programs—this approach didn’t work. They’d have to package a 3D library or engine along with the demo code which takes up a lot of memory. So, those folks came up with a pretty innovative approach. They used signed distance fields (SDFs) to define the geometry and then use raymarching to render the scene. The…from varun.ca

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