{"id":12821,"date":"2013-08-12T20:43:47","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T01:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=12821"},"modified":"2013-08-12T20:43:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T01:43:47","slug":"dragon-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=12821","title":{"rendered":"Dragon planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inspired by the shiny new toy of WebGL, I tried my hand last night and this morning at making a procedural object. As in my very earliest experiments with procedural texturing, I’m not bothering with things like geometry and polygons. Instead, the entire scene at any pixel is defined by a function that takes only three arguments: (1) the pixel’s horizontal position in the image, (2) the pixel’s vertical position in the image, and (3) the clock time at this animation frame.<\/p>\n

So I’m going way back to my original crazy idea that started this whole shader business in the first place: go ahead and run an entire computer program at every pixel of an image.<\/p>\n

Except that now, thanks to graphics processing units (GPUs), everything runs a few million times faster than it did when I first tried this stuff.**<\/sup><\/p>\n

Taking a cue from yesterday’s post, I decided to make a “Dragon planet”. It’s kind of a fantasy answer to the question “What would a planet be like if it were like a dragon?” I imagine such a planet would be angry. It would breath fire, but otherwise be mysterious and dark with hidden depths. And it would probably be green (the most common color for dragons).<\/p>\n

If you load the page you’re reading in Google Chrome (WebGL won’t work in Safari, and your version of Firefox may not support WebGL), then you can click on the link below:<\/p>\n


\n<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

 
When the page comes up in Google Chrome, you will see, on the left, the program that’s running on your GPU. That’s all the code needed to create the real-time animated planet, other than a few dozen lines of code that implement my noise and turbulence functions.<\/p>\n

Now we just need to make some creatures to live on the Dragon planet. Space dragons!<\/p>\n

** Thanks to Kris Schlachter, who helped me get started with WebGL!<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired by the shiny new toy of WebGL, I tried my hand last night and this morning at making a procedural object. As in my very earliest experiments with procedural texturing, I’m not bothering with things like geometry and polygons. Instead, the entire scene at any pixel is defined by a function that takes only … Continue reading “Dragon planet”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12821"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12821"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12841,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12821\/revisions\/12841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}