Green Shoots

A graphics entry by Alia of Church of the Spinning Cube, released at Silvester '21. A small symbol of hope for the year ahead...

This is rendered from a single compute shader, and consists of about a bazillion individual snowflakes, each made of transparent ice. Because if you want realistic looking snow, you gotta get the details right and that's how real snow works 🙃

The whole thing is path traced with my own renderer. It could've been a 4KB exegfx entry, but considering the extremely long render time (this render took about 4 hours on an M1 GPU) I decided not to bother and enter it as a pic. It's unedited, apart from conversion to 8bit PNG (my tools output 16bit HDR).

There's a few bits of interesting tech in this, particularly filling a volume with snow and rendering that at reasonable speed (I consider 4 hours reasonable for that many tiny glass objects 😂). There's a new (to me at least) firefly removal thing too. I'll probably do a write up if I don't get distracted by some new shiny or other...

- Alia