After the last post there was only one topic left on my list: The Trace() function. Initially it seemed like a quick and easy task to summarize my findings, the work was already done… but as with most things it kept getting longer as I was working on it.

I hope you’re still ready to follow along — this one takes a rather meandering tour around vector maths and trigonometry and being well rested seems advisable for my various musings.

Coming out of Post 2 we have gained a decent understanding of how the shape of the PIXAR letters is constructed. But there’s still a lot of ground left to cover, and for some unfathomable reason I’m still sorta committed to keep this deep-dive going.

Time to jump right back into aek’s pathtracer. What’s “5O5_” “5W9W” “5_9_" and how do we get the 3D letter “P” in PIXAR from that? Now we’re starting to get somewhere in our quest to understand every line of code, or rather every symbol printed on that postcard.

Right around the start of 2020, I came across the blog of Fabien Sanglard (fabiensanglard.net). I believe it was because his current series of blog posts (at the time of writing/stumbling-upon) about Another World and its ports were hitting the front page on HN.

But at the time a different post caught my eye and led me down a deep rabbit hole lined with copious amounts of vector math… it’s the one about “Deciphering The Postcard Sized Raytracer”.

LD 45 happened at the start of this month!

Why, what’s Ludum Dare, you ask? It’s a game jam that’s been happening three times a year – or more recently, two times as of this year – since all the way back in 2002. I believe I first heard of it when notch made a game called Minicraft for Ludum Dare 22, back in 2011.

This year, for the first time, I tried participating myself.

Hello World!

So I’ve started working on this personal homepage of mine. It might be a little bare right now, but getting started with Hugo.io was a breeze. I had the theme’s example site up after 10 or 15 minutes tops. I did already have the domain set up and all, just no content behind it.