The Juggler is back, in OSL!

Back in the days, the Juggler was an amazing feat of computer animation. Using ray-tracing, Eric Graham created it on his Amiga in Sculpt 3D. I still remember having my mind blown when I first saw this. Nowadays, you can re-create it in Blender in real-time :)

Youpi writes:

OSL is a very powerful and high level shading language. It’ near possible to do anything with it, even the most unexpected shaders!

As I was working on the FOSPHORE project, I was thinking “… spheres, spheres, spheres, just like the very first 3D on personal computers… “ and Wosh! I rushed back in time, in 1986, to Eric Graham’s Juggler.

It was a true milestone in Computer Graphic! If we are using 3D software on our PC now, it’s also because, one day, a small Juggler animation told us “it’s possible to do it without Mainframe Computer, with the computer on your desktop!”.

So, here is my OSL version of the Juggler!

I try to do it as close as possible to the 1986 rendering. So I wrote a true Minimalist Ray Tracer inside the OSL shader.

This shader is near Real-Time. And you can play with it inside Blender! (The first Juggler was more than one hour rendering time on Amiga computer in 1986, in 320x200 pixels).