DIGISIM.OBSERVATORY · category 08 — render
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category 08 · render

What a browser GPU can really do.

A reel of pure rendering muscle: fractals you fly into, a million particles stirred into a galaxy, fluids and slime-mould networks self-organising, procedural planets and path-traced light — every one solved live on the GPU, frame after frame, inside the page.

apps live 0
in design 0
opened 05·28
REND-001 · BUILT ready
featured
Smoke & Fire

A fullscreen WebGL2 fragment shader ray-marches a rising turbulent plume — domain-warped fBm density lit as blackbody emission near the hot base (deep red → orange → yellow → white) curling up into dark Beer-Lambert smoke on a black field.

renderwebglvolumetric
2026-06-05 /render/volumetric-fire
in this section · 31 apps
REND-002 ready
Volumetric Clouds

A fullscreen fragment shader ray-marches an altitude slab of fBm-noise clouds with single-scattering, Beer–Lambert transmittance, a short sun-march for self-shadowing, and a Henyey–Greenstein phase that gives the sun-side a bright silver lining — all drifting on the wind over a graded blue sky.

render /render/volumetric-clouds
REND-003 ready
GPU Terrain Erosion

A hydraulic-erosion solver runs entirely on the GPU: rain falls on an fBm-noise mountain, water flows downhill through a virtual-pipes grid, carves suspended sediment into branching drainage channels, and deposits it in valleys — all lit as a shaded 3D relief with translucent rivers and lakes.

render /render/terrain-erosion
REND-004 ready
Subsurface Scattering

A translucent jade-and-wax material studio: a custom shader fakes subsurface scattering so the object glows warmly where it is thin and back-lit — orbit it, push the translucency, and watch the light bleed through.

render /render/subsurface
REND-005 ready
Slime Mold 3D

Sixty-five thousand Physarum agents crawl, sense and deposit into a 64³ trail volume on the GPU, self-organising into a glowing three-dimensional network of slime-mold veins — raymarched and slowly rotating against black.

render /render/slime-mold-3d
REND-006 ready
Reaction-Diffusion 3D

A Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system run on a full 64³ GPU volume — packed as an 8×8 atlas of z-slices, stepped in RGBA32F ping-pong, then raymarched as a slowly turning cube so Turing coral and mitosis blobs emerge in true depth.

render /render/reaction-diffusion-3d
REND-007 ready
PBR Material Studio

A physically-based material showroom — drive metalness, roughness, clearcoat, transmission, sheen and IOR on a showcase mesh lit by a real reflected environment, and watch the surface go from brushed steel to lacquered car paint to clear glass in real time. Drag to orbit; metals genuinely mirror the room around them.

render /render/pbr-studio
REND-008 ready
Path Tracer

A progressive WebGL2 Monte-Carlo path tracer for a Cornell-box room — analytic ray-sphere/plane intersection, an emissive ceiling light, and diffuse, rough-metal, and glass spheres. Radiance accumulates into a float texture so soft shadows and colour bleeding converge from grain to clean within a second.

render /render/path-tracer
REND-009 ready
Million Particles

A WebGL2 GPGPU particle storm: up to a million points advected by an analytic curl-noise flow field, ping-ponged through RGBA32F position textures and drawn as additive glowing dots — a swirling galaxy of smoke that flows and reseeds in real time.

render /render/million-particles
REND-010 ready
Hair & Fur

A furry sphere whose tens of thousands of fur strands grow from a Fibonacci-distributed root field and sway in an animated wind — bent by gravity, curl, and stiffness, all on the GPU.

render /render/hair-fur
REND-011 ready
Boids Storm

A GPU murmuration of tens of thousands of birds — positions and velocities live in RGBA32F ping-pong textures, swept by a shared curl-noise wind field, a wandering attractor, and a darting predator so a starling-like flock folds, sweeps and reforms in soft additive trails.

render /render/boids-storm
REND-012 ready
Aurora Volumetric

A fullscreen WebGL2 fragment shader ray-marches volumetric aurora curtains over a night sky — thin emissive sheets that ripple and braid along a folded noise field, glowing green at low altitude and shading to magenta near the crown, flickering and drifting above a hash-sprinkled starfield.

render /render/aurora-volume
REND-013 ready
Wormhole

Fly toward an Ellis–Morris-Thorne wormhole as a fragment shader integrates each photon through the curved throat — a lensed circular portal that warps two whole universes, one warm and one cool, into a single sky.

render /render/wormhole
REND-014 ready
Raymarched Worlds

A fullscreen fragment shader ray-marches an endless signed-distance landscape — fBm noise terrain with atmospheric sky, soft shadows, and fog — that the camera flies through forever, morphing floating SDF columns in and out as you fly.

render /render/raymarched-worlds
REND-015 ready
Quaternion Julia

Ray-march a 4D quaternion Julia set sliced into 3D — the iteration q → q² + c sculpted into a gold-and-violet jewel that morphs as you push the fourth dimension through it, lit by soft shadows and ambient occlusion.

render /render/quaternion-julia
REND-016 ready
Plasma Globe

A volumetric plasma globe on the GPU — branching filaments of glowing gas writhe from a central electrode to the glass, flicker, and bend toward your pointer like a finger on the sphere.

render /render/plasma-globe
REND-017 ready
Ocean Renderer

A real-time spectral Gerstner ocean — rolling swell, choppy wind waves, foam-capped crests, sky reflection, and a sun glitter path to the horizon, all raymarched on the GPU.

render /render/ocean-fft
REND-018 ready
Newton Fractal

A WebGL2 fragment shader runs Newton's method on a complex polynomial per pixel, coloring each by which root it converges to — the famous interweaving basins of attraction with their delicate fractal boundaries — then lets you warp them with a complex relaxation factor and zoom into the self-similar seams.

render /render/newton-fractal
REND-019 ready
Nebula Forge

A fullscreen fragment shader raymarches a living cloud of fractal gas — drifting, domain-warped fBm lit by internal scattering and a glowing core — so the camera floats forever through a self-forging volumetric nebula painted across a deep cosmic palette.

render /render/nebula
REND-020 ready
Metaballs 3D

A molten blob of orbiting spheres melted together by a smooth-minimum distance field — a fullscreen ray marcher sphere-traces the SDF, shades it as chrome, iridescent goo, glass or lava, and lets the droplets merge and split into ever-shifting mercury topology as you drag to orbit the camera.

render /render/metaballs
REND-021 ready
Menger Voyager

An endless dive into a 3D Menger sponge — a fullscreen ray marcher folds an iterated box fractal in real time, lit by SDF soft shadows and ambient occlusion, with orbit-trap glow, drifting fog, and morph knobs for iterations, scale and fold that reshape the infinite cavern as you fall through it.

render /render/menger-voyager
REND-022 ready
Marching Cubes

Watch a triangle mesh get carved out of a 3D scalar field in real time — a handful of drifting metaball sources sum into a potential, and the classic 256-case marching-cubes algorithm extracts the f = isolevel isosurface every frame, fusing and splitting into one molten organic blob you can orbit; flip on the wireframe to see the raw triangles, and crank the grid from blocky to silk-smooth.

render /render/marching-cubes
REND-023 ready
Mandelbrot Voyager

A WebGL2 fragment shader iterates z = z² + c per pixel with smooth continuous coloring, then lets you click-to-dive, scroll, and pan through the Mandelbrot set — or sit back as it auto-zooms forever into a glowing seahorse valley.

render /render/mandelbrot
REND-024 ready
Kleinian Foam

A real-time dive into the limit set of a Kleinian group — a fullscreen ray marcher folds and inverts space through tangent spheres to grow an infinite froth of nested glowing bubbles, lit by SDF soft shadows and ambient occlusion with iridescent orbit-trap colour, and breathes as the fold parameter c slowly morphs the foam.

render /render/kleinian
REND-025 ready
GPU Fluid

A real-time Eulerian fluid solver living entirely on the GPU — drag to stir glowing dye through swirling, curling currents as ping-pong float textures advect velocity, project out divergence, and confine vorticity sixty times a second.

render /render/gpu-fluid
REND-026 ready
Galaxy

Half a million GPU stars wound into logarithmic spiral arms — hot blue-white youngsters tracing the arms, a warm amber bulge blazing at the core, dust lanes shadowing between, all drifting in differential rotation you can orbit and fly around like a god looking down on the Milky Way.

render /render/galaxy
REND-027 ready
Crystal Refraction

Ray-trace a faceted gem on the GPU — light bends entering the crystal, bounces by total internal reflection, and splits into rainbow fire as red, green and blue refract at slightly different indices.

render /render/crystal
REND-028 ready
Caustics

The shimmering net of light on a pool floor, solved live: sunlight refracts through an animated water surface of summed Gerstner waves, and a per-pixel ray Jacobian focuses neighbouring rays into the bright, restless caustic web — with godray shafts and a wavy surface tint over a tinted floor.

render /render/caustics
REND-029 ready
Black Hole

Ray-trace light bending around a Schwarzschild black hole — a Doppler-beamed accretion disk, a bright photon ring, and a gravitationally lensed starfield, all on the GPU.

render /render/black-hole
REND-030 ready
Apollonian Gasket

A ray-marched 3D Apollonian gasket — the famous self-similar packing of ever-smaller spheres, rendered as an infinitely nested bubble structure via a folding distance estimator, glowing with orbit-trap iridescence; orbit the camera, breathe the packing density, and watch the gasket pack space forever.

render /render/apollonian
REND-031 ready
4D Polytope

A tesseract turning through the fourth dimension. Two independent 4D rotation planes spin the hypercube, then a perspective projection casts its shadow into 3D — edges coloured by their depth in w.

3d /render/polytope-4d
REND-032 ready
Mandelbulb Voyager

A real-time ray-marched Mandelbulb — the 3D fractal solved by distance estimation every frame. Orbit it, zoom into the surface detail, and morph its power exponent live.

3d /render/mandelbulb-voyager
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