Technical Overview

This small demo project exploring stylized raytracing in the open source Godot engine was inspired by the game Mirror Drop and made over three days as a fun personal project.

The system consists of:

• A raytracing shader that renders all objects in the scene
• A scene manager script that maintains a list of all active spheres and handles encoding all material and transform data into a single texture that is sent to the display shader
• A sphere script that contains an object's radius, colors, and material (emissive and reflectance values) and registers the object with the scene manager on creation and deletion
• A camera script that takes the scene texture and feeds it to the material on one or more CanvasItem nodes, as well as the camera's transform information

Since spheres are currently the only supported shape, the scene rendering shader is fairly simple:

• Get the world-space origin and direction of the viewing ray using the fragment's SCREEN_UV and provided camera information
• Decode object transformation values from the scene texture
• Inverse transform the ray origin and direction for each object, test intersection, and re-transform the local hit position and normal
• Repeat with the hit position as the new origin and reflect the view direction by the hit normal
• Use normals, colors, and reflectance in a simple shading calculation at each step (up to a fixed number of bounces)

One nice thing about this setup is that all transformations of geometry are driven by standard Spatial nodes (the default 3D object in Godot).

As such, the source spatial nodes can be messed with just like in a normal game. For example the two smaller spheres in the demo are RigidBody nodes and can be clicked on or run into to bump them around.

Physics, animation, etc. run exactly the same as always, and the resulting transformations are encoded into the scene texture which is in turn passed to the display shader.

As with Mirror Drop, the primary limitation here is having a limited set of primitive shapes to work with, so no complex models, rigs, etc. as each shape has to be mathematically defined in the display shader. However, as evidenced by that game's 2019 IGF win in the visual art category, you can still get beautiful results for a minimal aesthetic using only simple shapes and a good choice of colors.

As for future plans with this demo, I'll probably release the current version's source project once I can clean it up a little bit and document everything. I don't have any commercial aspirations for the project as is (especially since it's aiming to recreate Mirror Drop), but I hope it can serve as a learning tool for others looking to get into graphics programming, both in Godot and more generally.

That said, I do have some exciting ideas for further research and development that could potentially lead to an interesting game concept.

Don't forget to check out the in-browser demo if you want to play around with the system yourself! You can adjust the maximum number of bounces, as well as see various debug visualizations of the scene.

If you're interested in seeing more content like this, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@RajinShankar) to see whatever it is I'm up to at the moment!