
The Moon made twice, at home - pplonski86
https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home-a2cb73b3f1e8
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pixelpoet
I did something similar a few years back with that 22gb displacement map,
although much more accurately and easily: it's a piece of cake to directly ray
trace a displaced sphere: you basically intersect two spheres (the outer and
inner radius), which gives you a ray interval that you can "march" through. At
each step while marching, you look at the surface height at the current point,
compare it to your point's radius, and if it's greater then you've intersected
the surface since the last step (and can perform bisection method to refine
the intersection distance to machine precision).

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ray_gray
That's actually how the displacement of the intersection is done here -
marching in the range between spheres. Bisection, however, wont work at
shallow angles.

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fit2rule
What a very nicely done, high quality project. I found it engaging to read the
reasoning along the way to a very neat bit art.

There was a time when such data-mangling was way, way off limits, in some
A/C'ed computer room somewhere .. and now here I am, setting up anaconda on
the trains' own wifi as a landscape scrolls past, rendering the moon while I
can see the real one out the window ..

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kingofpee
On reddit the OP said

>The visualization and video of the Moon were made with python and 3D ray-
tracing (it is not a photo!)

