Spherical Harmonics 2016-12-08
I recently learned of Spherical Harmonics and immediately proceeded to render them using my path tracer. For each render, I used marching cubes to generate a mesh for ray-intersection tests. But I used the gradient of the harmonic function to compute the surface normals for a nice, smooth appearance. The axes are modeled using a capsule-shaped signed distance function. I like how even the axes cast shadows.
I have yet to truly grok the applications of spherical harmonics. I really only learned enough to be able to render them.
