I finally got around to fixing the colours and fixing the distortion in the wada fractal. The wada, as a reminder, is a non-self similar fractal formed by placing four reflective spheres touching each other in a kind of pyramid. Although I didn't size crunch, I guess the whole thing would be sub 1.3k. Its hard to crunch it as the wada is very sensitive to things like ambient, diffuse and specular contributions so a full raytracer has to be implemented, not just a fake approximation.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that there are a range of interesting special effects available with very simple, recursive, raytracing. I won't publish code yet as likely I'll do a 4k using some of the tricks I'm working on. The point is, the wada would be very hard for traditional polygon rendering to do. The reflections would be too hard to achieve accurately. So, tiny raytracers should concentrate on lots of reflection and refraction instead of doing a range of simple primitives (sphere, cylinder, planes etc) and using you bytes this way is a mistake. Such scenes are unimpressive.
Add to this the possiblity for traditional 2d post processing (blur, depth of field, glow) on top of raytracing and there is definitely room for overcoming the "spheres on chequer board" factor.
The wada images above can be clicked on for larger versions. They are real screen captures from a real time wada renderer. Hence the larger images have some artefacts. A small blur post-processor shader will overcome this.
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