Pass 2 magnifies the object sheet where the surface steepens at the cracks,
so a one-pixel silhouette showed up as hard blocks. Nine jittered rays per
pixel give the edge a soft ramp instead.
Pass 1 draws one raymarched gem on sheet 1 instead of plasma; its alpha
carries coverage rather than depth, so pass 2 can light it as a solid
while every other sheet still absorbs by path length.
Normals are now sampled at 0.008 so the creases resolve instead of being averaged
away, and the seam sheen only lights the crack walls, which keeps the open water
black. Fracture steps are trimmed so the sheets break at a seam instead of smearing
into a pale ribbon.
Ridged grain replaces the smooth swells, and two families of fracture lines step the
height, so the refracted sheets break across hard seams instead of drifting. The
height field stays time-independent: only the plasma moves. Grazing rays at a step
are clamped so the sheets never smear off the atlas.
Pass 1 renders eight plasma sheets into an atlas with linear depth in alpha;
pass 2 marches the refracted ray to each sheet and absorbs it by real path
length, so near and far layers separate under pointer parallax. Plasma cycle
repeats exactly every 30 s; - / = change speed.
emil28092005