sdf-viewer VS bauble.studio

Afterward, this GLSL shader does the actual rendering. This shader is applied to a cuboid mesh that represents the bounding box of the object. The mesh is useful for only raytracing the part of the screen that may reach the object, and for extracting the rays for each pixel from the hit points. The shader simply walks along the ray for each pixel, moving by the amount of distance reported by the SDF on each position. If the surface is reached at some point, the normal is computed and the lighting is applied for the material saved in the closest voxel. To get the distance at a point that does not match the grid, interpolation is applied, leading to round corners if the level of detail is not high enough.

If you aren't familiar with SDFs, some rough intuition for what's going on here: you have some primitive functions that define shapes, you have combinators that distort shapes, and you then have combinators that distort space. And then when you trace rays through distorted space, you render an image that looks like your combinators distorted the shapes themselves, but really you're distorting the path that your rays travel along.

The operation here is that you distort space with the modulo operator. So now you have space that repeats -- and when you trace rays through this repeated space, you're basically teleporting the rays back to the origin (using mod in the classic "wrapping around" fashion) every time they pass out of a section of space.

And then ultimately the ray will collide with the shape -- the one shape -- that exists in this distorted space, after wrapping around some number of times.

If the idea of "taking the mod of space" is intriguing, I would encourage you to try playing with SDFs! It's a really incredible technique for real-time rendering of "3D vector graphics."

Also shameless plug for my SDF playground https://bauble.studio, and an example program that uses instanced repetition to render an "infinite" number of varying shapes:

    (tile [400 0 300] (fn [i]

Depending on what you're doing, Janet might be a great fit! I wrote a DSL for [expressing and shading 3D shapes](https://bauble.studio), and it was pretty easy. Depending on exactly what you're trying to do, the ease of embedding the Janet interpreter inside of other programs might be a big point in its favor.

For other inspiration check out Pyret in DCIC and the term Constructive Solid Geometry like Bauble