glacier: gone.

(disclaimer: this has nothing to do with the current talk on whether human or nature is responsible for the earth heating, and my personal opinion on that is irrelevant)

This image reminds of a place where there has been a glacier hundreds of years ago, malming this chaos into stone.

Rendered with picogen ([link]). This image is a presentation of the quad-tree implementation I have hacked this week. It was capable of rendering this image with 800 samples per pixel in around 7 hours, on one crappy Athlon XP singlecore (2400+). The resolution of the heightfield is 8193*8193, or around 130 Million Triangles. I believe in that I can render 16385*16385 on my box, with smaller nodes maybe even more.

Note that this quadtree has to do with the upcoming release of picogen 0.2, the first release that is capable of rendering userspace stuff; until now all images were pure programmers art, hardcoded into the sourcecode; what you see heree is fully defined in a so called SSDF-file (==static scene description format), exactly like this (is there any sort of [code] markup on DA??):

++
list{
brdf = lambertian(reflectance:0.8)
brdf = lambertian(reflectance:0.8)

hs-heightfield(resolution:8193; center:0,-5,0; size:50,5,50; code: (^ (- 1 (abs ([2 LayeredNoise frequency(15) layercount(12) seed(123) persistence((* 0.56 (-1 (abs x))))] (* x 0.5) (* y 0.5)))) 3) )
}
camera-yaw-pitch-roll(position:20,-4.0,-20.0; yaw:-0.7; pitch:0.0)
sunsky (turbidity:2.2)
sunsky (direction: 0.01,0.7,1.0)
sunsky (color-filter-rgb: 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 )
sunsky (sun-color-rgb: 900, 800, 700)
sunsky (fog-exponent: 0.05; fog-max-distance:100000)
--