Move your mouse to change the direction of the light. UPDATE: yes, this was clearly a prank. Haha.
This project uses a new ray-tracing technique I found to render a sphere, with any texture, with basic Phong-lighting and smooth normal interpolation. The albedo map is rendered as a bi-linearly interpolated Voronoi tessellation of an icosahedral geodesic lattice, in order to preserve a constant detail. The project also uses an algorithm to quickly predict (based on surrounding cell colors of the tessellation) a detail variance function, which we can then add to modify the interpolated albedo color. Since this is normal-based, it renders very fast, but there is a special simplicity about spheres we can take advantage of. And one more thing - there is also a faster way to render pen, which I also implemented. The only downsides to this amazing technique is that, due to the design of the detail-offset predictor function, a certain amount of noise is introduced into the final render. This means that the next step would be a final post-processing stack - a neural network denoiser, along with simulated sun glare, lens distortions, and while we are at it, why not throw in multiple balls? Wait, you're still reading this? Look inside, will ya?
