Really just a personal ray-tracing app. I coded it up in C# with an event-loop to update, and mouse-clicks emit a ray to hit-test against an object, allowing for interactivity. Then you can draw anything that you can programmatically describe to the ray-tracer.
I mean, a scatter plot's axes can be drawn as cylinders while the points can be spheres, etc., which makes it simple enough to throw together from most quick ray-tracing tutorial projects.
But what's really cool is that, once you put some objects together that form graphs and such, it's trivial to merge them with other scenes. Like, I was really interested in having a 3D walk-through of a chemical processing plant, where I could insert graphs linked to real-time data, where the graphs themselves are just part of the ray-traced scene (rather than being something like a skin on an object). So then the 3D walk-through basically has pop-up data views.
But for stuff like documents, I mostly just think of ray-tracing as the brute-force solution to anything that's not more easily done using another tool. I think the first time I used it for a plain graph, I was frustrated by trying to make a plot that had both surfaces and point-bubbles in it. So, I figured, hey, surfaces can just be interpolations of sample points, and the point-bubbles can just be little spheres.
_Nat_|7 years ago
I mean, a scatter plot's axes can be drawn as cylinders while the points can be spheres, etc., which makes it simple enough to throw together from most quick ray-tracing tutorial projects.
But what's really cool is that, once you put some objects together that form graphs and such, it's trivial to merge them with other scenes. Like, I was really interested in having a 3D walk-through of a chemical processing plant, where I could insert graphs linked to real-time data, where the graphs themselves are just part of the ray-traced scene (rather than being something like a skin on an object). So then the 3D walk-through basically has pop-up data views.
But for stuff like documents, I mostly just think of ray-tracing as the brute-force solution to anything that's not more easily done using another tool. I think the first time I used it for a plain graph, I was frustrated by trying to make a plot that had both surfaces and point-bubbles in it. So, I figured, hey, surfaces can just be interpolations of sample points, and the point-bubbles can just be little spheres.
TKAB|7 years ago