Alan Zucconi

Category: Tutorial

  • Fractals 101: The Mandelbrot Set

    Fractals 101: The Mandelbrot Set

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    This is the second part of Fractals 101, a series of tutorial dedicated to fractals. This post will investigate two popular fractals: the Mandelbrot set and its 3D cousin, the Mandelbulb.

  • Fractals 101

    Fractals 101

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    This new series of tutorials will explain what fractals are, why they are so important and what we can learn from them. This first lesson is a gentle introduction to the concept of iterated fractals and their dimension. Since fractals naturally occur in nature, this series will be particularly interesting to all artists and game developers who want to create…

  • How to Build a Heater with Arduino – Part 2

    How to Build a Heater with Arduino – Part 2

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    This is the second part of a tutorial that will teach you how to build a portable heating device with Arduino. In this post, we will explore how to control a heating resistor with Arduino. This allows to keep your setup at the desired temperature.

  • How to Build a Heater with Arduino – Part 1

    How to Build a Heater with Arduino – Part 1

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    This tutorial will explain how to build a portable heating device with Arduino. If you’re an amateur astronomer, this can be the perfect way to prevent the formation of dew on your mirrors and lenses. In my specific case, I’ve built one of those mini heaters to warm up a formicarium. Whether it’s for your feet or for…

  • Volumetric Rendering: Signed Distance Functions

    Volumetric Rendering: Signed Distance Functions

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    This tutorial explains how to create complex 3D shapes inside volumetric shaders. Signed Distance Functions (often referred to as Fields) are mathematical tools used to describe geometrical shapes such as spheres, boxes and tori. Compared to traditional 3D models made out of triangles, signed distance functions provide virtually infinite resolution, and are amenable to geometric manipulation. The following animation,…

  • Volumetric Rendering: Surface Shading

    Volumetric Rendering: Surface Shading

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    This third instalment on Volumetric Rendering will explain how to shade volumes in a realistic fashion. This essential step is what gives three-dimensionality to the flat, unlit shapes that have been generated so far with raymarching. You can find here all the other posts in this series: The full Unity package is available at the end of this article. 📦

  • Volumetric Rendering: Raymarching

    Volumetric Rendering: Raymarching

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    This post continues the tutorial on volumetric rendering, introducing one of the most used techniques: raymarching. You can find here all the other posts in this series: The full Unity package is available at the end of this article. 📦

  • Volumetric Rendering

    Volumetric Rendering

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    This is the first part of a Unity tutorial dedicated to Volumetric Rendering, raymarching and signed distance fields. These techniques allow us to overcome the biggest limitation of modern 3D engines, which only let us render the outer shell of an object. Volumetric rendering enables the creation of realistic materials that interact with light in a complex way, such as fog, smoke, water…

  • The Autocorrelation Function

    The Autocorrelation Function

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    The purpose of this tutorial is to show a simple technique to estimate periodicity in time series, called autocorrelation. This tutorial is part of a longer series that focuses on how to analyse time series.

  • Time Series Decomposition

    Time Series Decomposition

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    This tutorial will teach you how you can extract valuable information from time series, such as your sold copies on Steam or your Google Analytics. The previous part of this series introduced a technique called moving average, which has been used to attenuate the effects of noise in a signal. When signals represent an event that evolves over time,…