Big Fish in a Small Planet

Comment

Comment by Ethan Gross on January 19, 2017 at 12:12pm

Thanks Friedrich!

Comment by friedrich söllner on January 19, 2017 at 3:55am

I really love it.

Comment by Ethan Gross on January 8, 2017 at 4:07pm

Thanks Laurent. It is a fish model inside of the sphere, done in T-Splines and actually quite (unintentionally) lousy. I realized afterwords, that given the refractive distortion, I could have just used a collection of simple shapes to get the same, or better effect. Ray tracing with Neon and a transparent material seems to work pretty well.

Maybe more than you want to know, but the ripples are damped cosines generated at 20 vertices of a dodecahedron, projected onto a spherical mesh (actually, an icosahedral based geodesic sphere - to preserve that symmetry as much as possible) and the amplitude at each point of the mesh is the sum of the 20 cosine amplitudes based on the distance to each vertex. On a sphere it's not a difficult calculation because the distance between any two points is just their angular separation times R. I do get these 'cusps' at the 20 vertices though, rather than a smooth cosine, the reason for which I cannot figure out.

Comment by Laurent DELRIEU on January 7, 2017 at 1:23am

Nice effect. How is done this effect ? Is the fish a model inside the sphere or a réflexion on the sphere?