Show HN: I rendered the Go gopher using Go

https://github.com/fogleman/pt/blob/master/README.md

by fogleman • 11 years ago

287 47 11 years ago

github.com

jjmanton2• 11 years ago

Fogleman, you are an incredible developer. I hope to one day have your motivation for side projects like this.

fogleman11• 11 years ago

Thank you!

daddykotex2• 11 years ago

Wow, the quality is impressive. I had no time to look at the code, but what are your inputs?

Do you read a file that contains anything you need to render, if so, can you produce said file with another 3D software?

fogleman11• 11 years ago

The gopher is loaded from an OBJ file. The floor and back wall are cubes added programmatically.

daddykotex2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the info.

benreic2• 11 years ago

I was surprised at how little code it takes to generate the gopher, using your library, that's cool.

I started generating the gopher locally abd let it go through one iteration, taking 4:34, until I realized it takes 1000 iterations to fully render :) I killed it.

fogleman11• 11 years ago

It doesn't take 1000, that's just a giant number I put in. You can stop whenever you want (acceptable noise levels)

You can also reduce the resolution.

benreic2• 11 years ago

Good to know. How many iterations did you use to generate the images on github?

melling• 11 years ago

Do you have any observations about the performance of Go?

rjammala• 11 years ago

Very nice work!

akc• 11 years ago

What do rendering times in Go look like, compared to a similar C implementation?

jjmanton2• 11 years ago

One interesting benefit I see is the ability to easily parallelize the work. Take a look at the render implementation here - https://github.com/fogleman/pt/blob/master/pt/render.go#L28

fogleman11• 11 years ago

It was SO easy! The only tricks were GOMAXPROCS and not using the shared rand functions because they are synchronized.

fogleman11• 11 years ago

I don't have anything to compare to, but Go seems quite fast. I would guess no worse than 2x C in this case, but I'm pulling that number out of my butt.

Actually I was originally going to write this in C but it started to be a PITA and I had the spontaneous idea that maybe Go would be the right choice for this (never used it before). It totally was. No way I would've had this level of results so quickly in C.

Being a big fan of Python and C, Go seems like a really good middle ground. Really happy to have learned it.

gravitronic• 11 years ago

I took a look at your code as I've been writing go for side projects for the last few months and like to compare styles.

You nailed the idiomatic go approach to development imho. Very nice.

bitg• 11 years ago

I'm very very impressed by your code quality especially when this is just your first Go project. I'm an experienced Go developer btw. You're just so good.

dtf• 11 years ago

As someone trying to learn the basics of rendering, I was really pleased to see your project pop up on the github explore email today. It's very easy to follow, even for a non-Go programmer like me.

Performance question from a no-Go programmer though - does returning objects from functions incur a cost? For example "func Reflect() Ray {}" or "func Add() Vector" - do they create a new object on the heap? If so is that an issue in Go?

kid0m4n• 11 years ago

Have a look at http://kidoman.io/programming/go-getter-part-3.html

Did this last year comparing Go 1.2 with C/C++ (and lots of other languages contributed by others.)

The original version: http://kidoman.io/programming/go-getter.html

agildehaus• 11 years ago

Not very often I can look at a library and easily follow the code. I may spend a couple afternoons reading it just to understand how this works. Very nice.

ukandy• 11 years ago

"Disclaimer: This is my first time using Go."

"Hello World" wasn't challenging enough for you then!

Nice work.

rplnt• 11 years ago

import "github.com/fogleman/pt/pt"

How does this work?

mholt• 11 years ago

It provides access to all the exported types, functions, and variables found in https://github.com/fogleman/pt/tree/master/pt.

jdfellow• 11 years ago

Use `go get github.com/fogleman/pt/pt` and the code will be downloaded to $GOPATH/src/github.com/fogleman/pt/pt. Go imports are all absolute paths from $GOROOT or $GOPATH.

smothiki• 11 years ago

I always looked go as a programming language to develop systems and tools but , this is very interesting . Would be interesting in a benchmark results of rendering with other languages .

phkahler• 11 years ago

How many rays/sec are you getting per core? What kind of acceleration structure? How many primitives in the scene?

fogleman11• 11 years ago

Using a k-d tree. The gopher has 50,000 triangles. I'm not currently computing rays/sec.

ProfOak_• 11 years ago

Initially I saw the title expecting ascii art. Then I saw the amount of points, and clicked the link and I was supremely impressed.

sdsk8• 11 years ago

Fogleman,any plans to rewrite craft in go?

kylestlb• 11 years ago

Looking at your code makes me wish I could have used Go instead of c++/glut for my graphics course projects back in school.

josh2600• 11 years ago

Every time I see the Go gopher I think of Gopher[0] immediately.

[0]https://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc1436

shurcooL• 11 years ago

The code is really nice and clean [1], great job for someone's first Go project! I think it's a great example of how Go's simple and clean language design can lead more people to write high quality, readable code.

Question, I see you're using your own Vector and Matrix types and methods. Have you considered using an existing vector math library like mathgl [2]? Nothing wrong with your decision, I just wanted to hear your thoughts.

[1] http://gotools.org/github.com/fogleman/pt/pt

[2] http://godoc.org/github.com/go-gl/mathgl/mgl64

rmcpherson• 11 years ago

I'm getting runtime errors when trying to run the example locally, and compile errors for others (e.g. suzanne.go, 'not enough arguments in call'). Was there a recent update that broke the code?

pests• 11 years ago

Very lovely.

The only reason I'm commenting is to point it might have been easier for users if you linked to the project homepage rather than the readme file itself.

fogleman11• 11 years ago

Here he is from another angle: http://i.imgur.com/oOnadne.png

allending• 11 years ago

Disclaimer: This is my first time using Go.

Is it your first time writing a path tracer? Because this is pretty awesome.

fogleman11• 11 years ago

It is.

userbinator• 11 years ago

How big is the binary? I had to ask since you linked to the site of iq, the guy who wrote the insanely awesome Elevated 4k demo [1] and several other nice 4k procedurally-generated graphics [2].

[1] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938

[2] http://www.iquilezles.org/prods/index.htm

rcarmo2• 11 years ago

This is very nice. I wonder how hard it would be to turn this into a network renderer (I suppose farming out sections to other machines is challenging with path tracing, but may be wrong).

fogleman11• 11 years ago

Path tracing is extremely parallelizable.

rcarmo2• 11 years ago

Well, then... Any good network-transparent channel libraries for Go? :)

Show HN: I rendered the Go gopher using Go

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