3D Rendering With Ray Marching Explained in This Detailed Breakdown

Kenichi Yoneda, a brilliant Artist and Designer known as kynd.info online, has recently shared a comprehensive two-part breakdown, exploring the nuances of ray marching and discussing how the approach can be used for rendering 3D scenes.

For those unfamiliar, ray marching is a technique employed in computer graphics to depict a 3D scene. It operates by projecting "rays" from the viewer's standpoint and incrementally tracing them through successive points. This method is favored by many for rendering scenes with relatively straightforward shader code. Moreover, it proves to be an excellent tool for experimenting with 3D rendering.

In the first part of the write-up, the artist spoke at length about what ray marching actually is and how it can be used for 3D scenes, explained how to leverage Signed Distance Functions (SDF) to define the shapes of the objects, and showed how to cast rays from a viewpoint.

The second breakdown focuses more on using ray marching in 3D rendering, with Kenichi explaining the idea behind the setup, how to find the direction of the light source and the normal, how to move the shape around, how to place multiple objects in the scene by taking the minimum value of their SDFs, how to work with shadows and different types of projections, and more.

Each breakdown includes numerous example images, videos, and code, and is accessible in both English and Japanese. You can check out the first part here and the second one over here.

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