A ray marching and sphere tracing implementation for terrain rendering.

This project was my winning solo project submission to the Huawei Challenge #1: Interactive Landscape Graphics at SFU's 2025 Stormhacks hackathon.

This project was started with the challenge template in ray_marching_terrain_template/ provided by the Huawei team, and further developed by me during the 2 day hackathon.

This project improves upon the provided ray marching techniques for rendering 3D height maps by using:

• Sphere Tracing: Adaptive step size for optimized performance using an approximated SDF
• K-Lipschitz bound based Signed Distance Function: The K-Lipschitz upper bound on maximum slope in terrain is calculated from the provided Fractional Brownian Motion function for the height map caluclation
• Optimized Terrain Generation: The height map level of detail is dependent upon the camera distance from the mesh.
• Illinois Method: The Illinois method for root finding is used to reduce the number of small steps when the ray is close to the mesh surface

• sphereTraceAlgorithm/ - GLSL shader templates
  • sphere_traced_ray_march.glsl - Main shader implementation
  • include/support_functions.glsl - Utility functions and terrain generation
• calculate_raymarching_steps.py - Python script for performance analysis
• image_compare.py - Image comparison utilities
• BasselineRaymarchedImages/ - Original algorithm renders
• SphereTracedImages/ - My optimized algorithm renders

• Perlin noise based height maps
• Fractal Brownian Motion (FBM) for realistic terrain
• Distance-based level of detail optimization

• Sphere Tracing: Adaptive stepping with maximum terrain slope bounded by K-Lipschitz
• Early Termination: Plane intersection for performance optimization
• Illinois Root Calculation: Hit detection is optimized with the Illinois method

• Total step count reduced by 37.8%
• FPS increase on my machine from 10 to 17 FPS
• Memory usage decrease from 7.5 to 6 MB
• Time to render each frame decrease from 100MS to 60MS

1. Load the GLSL shaders in your graphics application
2. Adjust terrain parameters in support_functions.glsl
3. Run calculate_raymarching_steps.py for performance analysis