-- Kuat 0.2 r1 --

A KDE Realtime Raytraced Quaternion Julia Screensaver

This program ray traces the quaternion Julia set in a fragment shader using the sphere tracing method. The program draws a fullscreen quad where each fragment of the quad specifies a different ray. These rays are passed to the fragment shader which iteratively takes conservative steps along a ray as determined by a distance estimator for the set.

The rays will either stop when close to an isosurface of the distance function (considered a hit), or leave the bounding sphere of the Julia set. If the ray is a hit, shading is performed by approximating the gradient of the distance function and using this as a surface normal.

A more complete description of the sphere tracing method can be found in John Hart's paper, "Ray Tracing Deterministic 3-D Fractals" (http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~jch/papers/rtqjs.pdf).

By default the program will shift through random constants for the Julia set within the cube [-1,1]^4. Increasing the number of iterations or the precision will increase the amount of detail seen in the rendering. The former more accurately determines whether a point is included in the set, whereas the latter intersects an isosurface of the distance function closer to the actual set. Both of these parameters run into precision or computation limits when set too high.

The original has been modified and implemented as a KDE Screensaver here Kuat-0.2.tar.bz2

Requires C for GPU Dev Toolkit

The Cg Toolkit provides a compiler for the Cg language, runtime libraries for use with both leading graphics APIs, runtime libraries for CgFX, example applications, and extensive documentation. Supporting over 24 different OpenGL and DirectX profile targets, Cg will allow you to incorporate stunning interactive effects into your 3D applications.

The components include: * NVIDIA Cg Compiler Release 1.5 * Unified Cg/CgFX Runtime * Cg User's Manual * Cg Language Specification * Example programs and shaders

Get it here developer.nvidia.com