Experiment: cityscape with raymarching

Realtime raymarched (similar to raytracing) cityscape. Ongoing experiment, I'm trying to get decent looking buildings + city blocks. No detail yet, that will be added later.

It's basically an infinite city, procedurally generated (per frame, nothing is pre-calculated) with dynamic soft shadows. It's rendered on GPU using raymarching (also known as sphere tracing). There's just one polygon drawn, the rest exists purely within the shader. Written in GLSL, using quartz composer for convenience.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• demoscene
• raytracing
• raymarching
• glsl
• quartz composer
• realtime

[cyborgtroy]

What card are you using for this?

I have a really old GeForce 7900 GS and even really basic raymarching chokes it completely.

[psonice]

@cyborgtroy either a radeon 2600, or a 4670 when I'm at work. The 2600 struggles with scenes like this, it's OK at say 320x240 though. My last video (with the reflecting twisting pipes) runs ok at 640x480 on the 2600, so I think your card should handle things like that.

[gtoledo3]

The marching buildings stuff is particularly cool. I wish you'd post it! It reminds me a lot of menger sponge like shapes, repeated (when you do the window cutouts).

[cyborgtroy]

@psonice - My card was pretty decent when I bought it 4 years ago, but at 960x600 it struggles just to march two spheres.