

WebGL Path Tracing - steren
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

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hebejebelus
That's fantastic. I've been meaning to get into WebGL (perhaps make some sort
of tech demo game with it). I've held off because of performance issues (also,
I admit, I'm not too excited about dealing with shaders).

I think I should stop procrastinating now and actually do something with it.
This is very exciting!

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dualogy
Shaders are fun! Looks a bit like "scary c++" at first but not too steep a
learning-curve actually. No header files, pointers and the likes. Just a
couple of maths functions and maths types (vec3, float etc). Pixel shaders
return a "color" vector, vertex shaders a vertex "position" and "that's about
it".

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hebejebelus
Oh, really? That sounds eminently doable. Do you happen to have any fantastic
resource for shaders?

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dualogy
Learn them together with WebGL -- I recommend "The Lessons" over at
LearningWebGL.com very highly.

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hebejebelus
That's a great site, thanks very much.

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crazygringo
This is one of the coolest things I've seen all year, without exaggeration.
The gradual rendering alone is new to me (and utterly fascinating), but the
fact that diffuse lighting can be rendered in a browser... this completely
redefines what I understand a browser to be capable of. Seriously amazing.

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aidenn0
If you haven't seen path-tracing before, you should check out LuxRender:
<http://www.luxrender.net/> It's an open source unbiased renderer that uses
similar techniques.

It's a massively parallel problem, so the recent abilities to run general
purpose code on a graphics accelerator has really been a huge boost to
performance something like: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70uNjjplYzA> would
have been impossible before CUDA came out.

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davidwparker
Fantastic use of WebGL. It's amazing how much can be done in browsers today.
Also amazing how much it heats up my MBP!

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jxcole
This guy is an inspiration:

<http://madebyevan.com/about/>

I've been struggling to complete a web page app like this for a while, and he
has finished several even though he's still in school.

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dark_c
Warning: caused a complete system hangup here with Chrome 13 on Windows 7,
Intel graphics.

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barrydahlberg
Chrome 13, Windows 7 - display driver (Intel Integrated) crashed but Windows
managed to recover it. Intel graphics related issue maybe?

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jasonkostempski
Exact same setup and experience for me.

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timb
Beautiful... the fading grain as it renders is extremely pleasing.

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pstadler
Indeed, very polished. It's so awesome! Nice experience, very smooth
(OSX/Radeon/FF5).

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ansonparker
Found a little easter egg. Enter

javascript:ui.setObjects(makeRecursiveSpheres())

in the location bar with the page open and you'll really torture your graphics
card.

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ansonparker
This is killer. Be sure to try dragging the scene/objects!

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jak3px
Looks very promising. Congrats for the imp of the idea. Now I'll try to get
out javascript/browser from the performance equation and see how it rocks.

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evilswan
Works splendidly - 2011 MBP w/Radeon latest FF stable.

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azakai
Works great here too, FF8 on Linux with NVidia drivers.

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windsurfer
Works great! Until I overloaded it. Made my graphic driver crash.

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dewbot
well you should try <http://www.3dtin.com> too then

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atilimcetin
amazing! converges very fast.

