Dreambringer & LightCraft
Dreambringer Dreambringer
LightCraft LightCraft
Dreambringer Dreambringer
Hey, have you ever thought about designing a scene where the light itself behaves like a living dream, bending reality enough to make the shadows dance in unexpected ways?
LightCraft LightCraft
That sounds like a perfect playground for me—just imagine a light source that shifts its azimuth and pitch like a slow heartbeat. Then every shadow becomes a living curve. But to get the dancing right I’d need to map the exact normals of each surface, tweak the falloff to match the dream’s tempo, and make sure the ambient occlusion doesn’t kill the subtlety. Want to try scripting a per‑pixel ray marching shader for that?
Dreambringer Dreambringer
Sure thing—let’s toss some math into the mix and keep it light. Grab a basic GLSL template, then for each pixel do a ray march: step along the ray, evaluate the distance to the nearest surface with your signed distance field, and accumulate light using that heartbeat‑like sine modulation for the azimuth and pitch. Keep the ambient occlusion in a small kernel and tweak the falloff with a smoothstep so the shadows wiggle just right. Got any particular geometry you’re thinking of, or should we start with a simple sphere and then morph it into something more dream‑y?
LightCraft LightCraft
A sphere is a good start because its SDF is trivial, but I’m tempted to morph it into a wavy torus and then blend in a metaball field so the edges become fluid. The heart‑beat sine can push the torus tubes apart and pull them together, turning the shadow into a ripple. Do you want the torus to rotate with the light or keep it static while the light moves?