Ball Pit

(codepen.io)

89 points | by memalign 2 hours ago

9 comments

  • verytrivial 1 hour ago
    For some context, I think this is by mr.doob of three.js fame.
  • RankingMember 50 minutes ago
    > The babies look unhappy

    > Add more balls

    Fun simulation. The novelty of stuff like this still hasn't worn off for me in this era where we've got ray tracing in-browser.

  • simlevesque 2 hours ago
    Beware: this might totally freeze your computer like it did for me.
    • ivanjermakov 1 hour ago
      WebGPU moment (have same issue on Firefox/Linux).
    • daemonologist 1 hour ago
      Had to break out Chromium for this one - Firefox+Linux does not like webgpu (my whole DE started flickering).
      • mentalgear 52 minutes ago
        I was amazed that it run smoothly on Firefox mac without WebGPU.
    • amelius 2 hours ago
      Works fine on my phone, Firefox+GrapheneOS.
    • ninju 2 hours ago
      definitely needs a lot of computing power
  • p1necone 2 hours ago
    This runs pretty smoothly on my middling laptop CPU while looking like a typical raytracing demo. I assume there's some smoke and mirrors involved?
    • h4ch1 1 hour ago
      No, it's using the newish SSGI and TRAA webgpu nodes. The three team has been making great progress with SSGI and webgpu in general and i'd recommend checking it out if you're interested.

      There's also a denoise node in three (not used in this example), but SSGI still looks kinda blurry.

      Work though is still going on: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/31892

      • Sharlin 1 hour ago
        Jesus Christ, trying to figure out what TRAA is (presumably an anti-aliasing algorithm) and how it works and it's entirely impossible to google.
        • h4ch1 35 minutes ago
          TRAA basically works by using a history buffer, for example using the last couple of frames, all jittered a little bit to compute the pixel. There's still ghosting and smearing that can happen though because of this technique, so you have methods to counteract like subpixel correction where u increase temporal alpha when velocity is subpixel, but that can introduce some artifacts as well.

          There's also SMAA T2x which the pmndrs team is planning on integrating into their postprocessing package[0]. This cryengine3 slideshow gives a nice overview of antialiasing methods if you're interested: http://iryoku.com/aacourse/downloads/13-Anti-Aliasing-Method...

          [0] https://github.com/pmndrs/postprocessing

          This paper also provides a decent overview of TRAA: https://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/cs/Education/EDAN35/projects/17C...

        • menno-dot-ai 1 hour ago
          Temporal reprojection anti aliasing :)

          https://www.threejs-blocks.com/docs/traaHD

          • Sharlin 1 hour ago
            The only thing even remotely related to graphics I found was references to "TrAA" in forum posts from 2006 (yeah) where I believe they referred to NVIDIA "Transparency AA" or something like that. "TRAA", "TRAA meaning", "TRAA graphics", "TRAA 3D" all gave fully irrelevant results :D
            • jldugger 30 minutes ago
              If you make the assumption that "AA" is some form of antialiasing, it's not too bad: first scholar[1] hit expands the acronym to Temporal Reprojection Anti-Aliasing

                  [1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=traa+anti+aliasing&btnG=
  • CodeWriter23 1 hour ago
    I was able to get all the balls stuck on the 'ceiling'. Bug or feature?
  • Rendello 2 hours ago
    Beautiful, this must have been an excellent learning experience to make.

    I've done some very basic rendering code in C from a rendering internals course, and at the same time I'm learning about perspective from the drawing/art side. I wonder how much learning one would help the other, in a practical way.

    • akie 1 hour ago
      The author is a world renowned expert in 3D graphics.
  • hermitcrab 1 hour ago
    I'm a C++ programmer and only passingly familiar with web/JS stuff. What libraries/technologies is this using, apart from Javascript and three.js?
  • newobj 2 hours ago
    path tracer?
    • newobj 2 hours ago
      nevermind i see the ssgi/traa code. looks great!
  • jessepasley 2 hours ago
    Is this marketing for the Shape Store? It's cool but I still don't know when my area is getting a Shape Store.