Shadertoy / Robotic Arm Hunting Lights

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This shader is a proof of concept to find out if I could create a “typical” Shadertoy shader, i.e. a shader that renders a non-trivial animated 3D scene, by using a ray tracer instead of the commonly used raymarching techniques.

Some first conclusions:

• It is possible to visualize an animated 3D scene in a single shader using ray tracing.
• The compile-time of this shader is quite long.
• The ray tracer is not super fast, so it was not possible to cast enough rays per pixel to support global illumination or soft shadows. Here I miss the cheap AO and soft shadow algorithms that are available when raymarching an SDF.
• Modelling a 3D scene for a ray tracer in code is verbose. It was not possible to exploit the symmetries in the arm and the domain repetition of the sphere-grid that would have simplified the description of an SDF.
• I ran in GPU-dependent unpredictable precision problems. Hopefully, most problems are solved now. I’m not sure if they are inherent to ray tracing, but I didn’t have these kinds of problems using raymarching before.

Source code

You can find (the full source of) Robotic Arm Hunting Lights on Shadertoy.