Neon Flow, 3D Splines, Parameterization, Nvidia 4090, 50 Million points
92024-12-25. Point cloud generated using 3D parameterization of sine waves as a foundation. From this base, a circle split into 10 segments is oriented to follow the same spline. However, the circle rotation is made out of sync, so that it rotates more quickly, as though it's following the spline faster, ahead of schedule. The circle's radius oscillates.
RENDER
The point cloud is rendered as connected lines to ensure the gaps are filled when the curves are close to the camera, though with 50,000,000 points, it is hardly necessary -- but does appear as bright dots when the curve moves very quickly and is very close.
Points further from the camera are rendered darker. They are rendered with a Z buffer, so they do not combine with transparency -- this allows the coloring to not brighten to white, losing the chromatic information.
Post processing takes the individual pixels and enlarges them into a 15x15 pixel circle. During this enlargement, additive blending is applied. The darkened colors in the distance help lower their impact to the final color, to not overwhelm the scene with colors, but also to not cause the final color to become white.
The final target is 1920x1080, and it is upscaled to 4K before upload.
SPLINE
It is a simple 3D parameterization using multiple octaves of sine waves. Borrowing the concept from 3D value noise, I set base values, and compute other octaves using constant frequency and lacunarity values. There are 3 octaves for the foundational spline, and the out-of-sync spline the circle segments are "following" for its orientation.
FRAME RATE
This is the NVidia 4090 power showing at full strength. While the final video is 60 Hz, the rendering generally over 600 Hz with 20,000,000 points, and from 250 to 400 Hz with 50,000,000 points. It depends on what is visible.
I develop this on my Alienware m18 R2 with a 480 Hz monitor, which is 8x the frame rate of 60 Hz. When these ultra smooth lines zip past the camera, that feeling is lost when you lose 7 out of every 8 frames. For this to be experienced the same by the viewer of the 60 Hz recording, it minimally needs blur motion post-processing, or actual blur motion by combining 8 frames into 1.
OPTIMIZATION
There is no optimization code to reject points out of the view frustrum. Also, the 15x15 sized post-processing is 225 color and depth samples per pixel, at 1920x1080, that's 466,560,000 samples for both, or 933,120,000 samples in total, every frame. The NVidia 4090 is not slow. This type of sampling is quite similar to Gaussian blur optimizations, and could be heavily optimized.
COLOR
Distance through the spline changes the hue of the color, keep the value and saturation at 100%.
CAMERA
The camera movement is linked to the spline.
FONT
The HUD was updated from past videos to be more minimal, to not distract from the visuals. The font is Berlin Sans FB.
HARDWARE
Alienware m18 R2 with NVidia 4090 GPU, bought day one availability from Dell: January 23, 2024.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 16GB GDDR6 (laptop version)
14th Gen Intel Core i9 14900HX (24-Core, 36MB L3 Cache, up to 5.8GHz Max Turbo Frequency) (16 E-Cores, and 8 P-Cores hyperthreaded = 32 V-Cores total)
64 GB: 2 x 32 GB, DDR5, 5200 MT/s, non-ECC, dual-channel
18" FHD+ (1920 x 1200) 480Hz, 3ms, ComfortView Plus, NVIDIA G-SYNC + DDS, 100% DCI-P3, FHD IR Camera
AlienFX RGB backlit Alienware CherryMX ultra low-profile mechanical keyboard
4 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
PLAYLISTS
Xona System 8: • Game Dev Engine #1. A New Beginning.
Voxel: • Voxel Engine #8 - Correct Peripheral ...
Nvidia 4090: • Nvidia GeForce 4090, 3D Sierpiński Ca...
Road: • Pseudo 3D Road #8 - infinite vegetati...
Wave Function: • A.I. Texture Generation, High Res (Wa...
Graph-All: • #1 Graph-All Equation Renderer - Mult...
Ray Cast: • 3D Ray Casting Engine: #4 (Global Gam...
Scroll Shmup: • The First Pixel: Devlog #9 - Enemies,...
Arena Shmup: • Arena Shmup Demo #3 - Object Pool Opt...
3D Polygon: • 3D Polygon Engine #9 - Multiple Mater...
GW-BASIC: • GW-BASIC - Escape From Monster Cavern...
WEBSITES
GitHub: https://github.com/JDoucette
Blog: http://thefirstpixel.com/
Studio: http://xona.com/
MUSIC
The Voyage by Audionautix
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0