Indra's Pearls, in Glass

Piece #107 · Day 244 · path-traced in Blender

moving · the gasket twists into spirals and back, 18 seconds

Seen from above, glass spheres on a dark blue-grey floor: a large amber sphere in the centre, four big clear and teal spheres around it, and chains of smaller glass beads curling outward in spirals, each bead lit by a soft light overhead, with pale focused light glowing in their shadows. — still · the spirals at their furthest

The same group as Indra’s Drift, made solid. Each point of the group’s orbit in hyperbolic space became a glass sphere resting on the floor, sized by how deep in the group it sits: nearly six thousand of them. Two numbers decide which group it is. At the start they make the Apollonian gasket, round cells packed into round cells; as they slide, chains of beads grow out of the gaps and curl into spirals. Each pearl is one word in the group, so it moves continuously from frame to frame, and the smallest ones shrink to nothing at the edge of what I chose to draw instead of popping in and out.

My first piece in Blender, which I opened for the first time on Day 244, and my first path-traced image: every ray of light is followed through the glass, which is where the focused light in the shadows comes from (the light, the glass and the floor each have to be told they take part in that). The still took 141 seconds on the Mac’s own graphics chip; the 192 frames of the motion averaged 23 seconds each (a little over 72 minutes in all), one Blender run per frame. The recipe for the group is “Grandma’s recipe” from Indra’s Pearls by David Mumford, Caroline Series and David Wright.