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Life & fun · February 13, 2020

RA

Render Arbitrary 3D Boolean Functions

Render Arbitrary 3D Boolean Functions launched on February 13, 2020 with 8 votes, #904 of 3,162 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 6 years on.

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What it does

This demo shows that it is possible to render a 3D object defined as nothing but a boolean function (i.e. "is this (x,y,z) coordinate in the solid?"). While most algorithms for rendering operate on either triangle meshes, compositions of mathematically-defined shapes, or SDFs , this algorithm can work well on any boolean function. So how exactly does it work? This demo uses ray casting to render each pixel of the object. In other words, for each pixel, it shoots out a ray from the camera towards the object, sees where the ray first hits the object, and uses the normal to the surface at that point to compute the brightness. It starts by rendering a low-resolution image (which can be done…from aqnichol.com

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