Occlusion culling illustration

I made this! It shows the spheres that would be visible from the point of view of someone standing in the center of a huge cubic lattice field of spheres, with the space filling factor changing from very small to very large and back. Black regions are where spheres are not visible due to occlusion from foreground spheres.

https://giphy.com/embed/3oz8xZVpYzNwhe9xza

I extended the method to 3 dimensions. The following shows the visible spheres in a 3D cubic lattice viewed from the center (200X200) with a radius-to-spacing ratio of 0.12 and an angular z-depth buffer with angular resolution of pi/8000. The gif scans through one of the symmetric dimensions in time, and plots the other two dimensions in the x-y plane of the screen. It creates a very mesmerising pattern, don't you think?

https://giphy.com/embed/26hit54kJf5X8sRSo

I created an occlusion culling algorithm in order to make the rendering of spherical opaque objects in 3D space more efficient, for making videos like this one: