I wrote the following shader to render a pattern with a bunch of concentric circles. Eventually I want to have each rotating sphere be a light emitter to create something along these lines.
Of course right now I'm just doing the most basic part to render the different objects.
Unfortunately the shader is incredibly slow (16fps full screen on a high-end macbook). I'm pretty sure this is due to the numerous for loops and branching that I have in the shader. I'm wondering how I can pull off the geometry I'm trying to achieve in a more performance optimized way:
EDIT: you can run the shader here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lssyRH
One obvious optimization I am missing is that currently all the fragments are checked against the entire 24 surrounding circles. It would be pretty quick and easy to just discard these checks entirely by checking if the fragment intersects the outer bounds of the diagram. I guess I'm just trying to get a handle on how the best practice is of doing something like this.
#define N 10
#define M 5
#define K 24
#define M_PI 3.1415926535897932384626433832795
void mainImage( out vec4 fragColor, in vec2 fragCoord )
{
float aspectRatio = iResolution.x / iResolution.y;
float h = 1.0;
float w = aspectRatio;
vec2 uv = vec2(fragCoord.x / iResolution.x * aspectRatio, fragCoord.y / iResolution.y);
float radius = 0.01;
float orbitR = 0.02;
float orbiterRadius = 0.005;
float centerRadius = 0.002;
float encloseR = 2.0 * orbitR;
float encloserRadius = 0.002;
float spacingX = (w / (float(N) + 1.0));
float spacingY = h / (float(M) + 1.0);
float x = 0.0;
float y = 0.0;
vec4 totalLight = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < M; j++) {
// compute the center of the diagram
vec2 center = vec2(spacingX * (float(i) + 1.0), spacingY * (float(j) + 1.0));
x = center.x + orbitR * cos(iGlobalTime);
y = center.y + orbitR * sin(iGlobalTime);
vec2 bulb = vec2(x,y);
if (length(uv - center) < centerRadius) {
// frag intersects white center marker
fragColor = vec4(1.0);
return;
} else if (length(uv - bulb) < radius) {
// intersects rotating "light"
fragColor = vec4(uv,0.5+0.5*sin(iGlobalTime),1.0);
return;
} else {
// intersects one of the enclosing 24 cylinders
for(int k = 0; k < K; k++) {
float theta = M_PI * 2.0 * float(k)/ float(K);
x = center.x + cos(theta) * encloseR;
y = center.y + sin(theta) * encloseR;
vec2 encloser = vec2(x,y);
if (length(uv - encloser) < encloserRadius) {
fragColor = vec4(uv,0.5+0.5*sin(iGlobalTime),1.0);
return;
}
}
}
}
}
}