Glass Blob Rendering

Designed and built reactive visualizers for audio synthesis plugin in C++/GLSL.

Future Audio Workshop hired me to develop reactive visuals for their upcoming music synthesizer software. They were looking to develop an interactive “glass blob” that has highly-customizable and could represent different synthesizer presets.

To accomplish this, I created a novel real-time deferred rendering pipeline that could emulate refractive raytracing at a fraction of the computational cost. I used a multi-pass approach, rendering pixel depth and normals for the front and back faces separately, then using this information to calculate an approximate light path through the material.

The pipeline supports:

• Six-band spectral refraction and dispersion
• A custom micro-faceting model to simulate ground glass
• LAB-space perceptual blending
• HDRI transmission and reflection maps
• Screen-space post-processing effects
• PBR-style parameters
• HDR color grading

Skills: computer graphics, JUCE plugin development, OpenGL/GLSL, physically-based rendering, color science, graphic design