CPU-rendered - zero external assets
Small physics scenes, ray-traced one pixel at a time.
Nine self-contained vignettes. Each is a pure-C# Sim(t) function feeding a
from-scratch CPU tracer - Gerstner ocean waves, Arrhenius glass viscosity, blackbody metal glow,
Coulomb traction on a snowmobile - baked to a looping GIF straight off the software renderer. No GPU,
no engine, no image files: just math, geometry, and a palette.
Ray-traced
Cathedral Board
An 8x8 chessboard cathedral: a hero auto-tours all 64 tiles, each a distinct interaction - wet-marble reflections, per-light contact shadows, stained-glass colored light, candle fire and smoke, fountains.
BVH tracer - one shared world
Physics loop
Avalanche Chase
A snowmobile outruns a powder avalanche in a split telescope / chase-cam view. SI physics: F=ma, Coulomb traction cap, v-squared aero drag, spring-damper suspension, avalanche a=g(sin - mu cos) with mass entrainment.
telescope FOV 3x / 10x / 20x
Physics loop
Wave Surfer
A surfer planes across Gerstner travelling ocean waves - orbital displacement with analytic slope and normal - held in a real planing-lift force balance and filmed as a seamless "one more wave" loop.
Gerstner waves - shot-director cam
Phase change
Iron Foundry
Iron heated to melt and cast: a latent-heat plateau, Draper-point blackbody glow climbing into incandescence, solidification shrinkage, and a quench-steam burst.
blackbody glow - Sim(t) to state
Phase change
Glass Furnace
Soda-lime glass heated in a furnace: Arrhenius log-viscosity across the glass fixed points, blackbody thermal glow as it climbs in temperature, then thermal-stress fracture.
Arrhenius viscosity
Phase change
Hot Ice Crystallizer
Supersaturated sodium acetate ("hot ice") crystallizing exothermically: a nucleation trigger sweeps a front that releases 264 kJ/kg of latent heat, setting at 58 C.
nucleation front
Phase change
Wax Candle
A burning candle: capillary wick draw feeds vapor combustion with balanced C25H52 stoichiometry, mass tracked as fuel burns off, plus wax drip and resolidification.
combustion stoichiometry
Phase change
Stove Water Cycle
A closed water cycle on a stove - melt, heat, boil, vapor rise, transit, freeze, spiral back - with physically-proportioned phase durations that spend latent-heat barriers before sensible heat.
latent vs sensible heat
Real-time
Realtime Arena
"Mirror Arena" - a CPU-only, multithreaded playable renderer running its real sim and render loop in a half-block truecolor terminal at hundreds of fps. Shown as a live frame capture, not a pre-baked loop.
live capture - multithreaded loopHow it works
A pure function from time to pixels.
Every vignette is the same shape: a deterministic Sim(t) advances the physics for a
phase in the loop, a from-scratch CPU ray tracer shades the resulting geometry, and the frames are
written straight to a GIF. No graphics API, no shading language, no third-party library - the
renderer, the BVH, the blackbody curves and the palette are all hand-written against the .NET base
class library. The loops here are downscaled to 540 px and trimmed in frame count so the gallery
stays light; the source scenes render larger.
The self-tests behind each scene assert the physics, not the picture: avalanche acceleration equals g(sin - mu cos), aero drag grows with the square of speed, telescope FOV narrows exactly with magnification, and every loop is continuous at its seam.