Pretty.<p>I had obviously expected that, but the large number of reflective surfaces [1] greatly reduces the performance. The author explained in the blog post [2] that it is a path tracing (Monte Carlo simulation of multiple random rays incrementally averaged) and probably it is hard to limit the number of bounces small while maintaining the image quality. Indeed, the source code [3] says a hard limit of 1000 bounces, not big but not that small either.<p>[1] Something like <a href="http://is.gd/cFDlq5" rel="nofollow">http://is.gd/cFDlq5</a><p>[2] <a href="http://scanlime.org/2013/04/zen-photon-garden/" rel="nofollow">http://scanlime.org/2013/04/zen-photon-garden/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/blob/bea23c1/hqz/src/zrender.cpp#L329" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/blob/bea23c1/hqz/src/z...</a>
Every time I see this link, which is about every year or so, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to build a "laser". It really feels possible, using a combination of diffuse/reflective to "corral" all the light into going mostly in the same direction. Would love to see if anyone has gotten close.
Very cool indeed. Surprisingly expressive.<p>My one issue - the diffuse/reflective/transmissive sliders don't seem to cause the image to update?
We had a good discussion going on when this was submitted before.<p>Zen Photon Garden is always a nice thing to play around with.<p>I even wrote a patch that made the rays deterministic when you draw extra walls. It reduced the flickering, but I learned that this was part of the aesthetics, so it was less fun to play with.
I thought it was a pretty good quality simulation, because after drawing some surfaces, dragging the Exposure tab from bottom to top made me flinch at the seeming "brightness".