Inigo Quilez
13 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2021–2025
24:46 · 458K views · Nov 28, 2020
Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.
HN repeatedly calls it a mind-blowing and accessible introduction to SDFs and procedural art from a master explainer.
19 comments from Hacker News
If you don't have an understanding of signed distance fields, this video is an amazing demo of their power. There are more videos about the fundamentals of SDFs at [LINK] The interesting thing about this paper is that they replace the mathematical SDF with a neural net that computes SDF_NN(x,y,z) => -1/1 and use this as a compression system for mesh based inputs. This feels like a graphical version of the [LINK] for NN-based text compression.
I see a Inigo Quilez link, I upvote! He's one of those incredible artist-engineer out there always pushing boundaries further and sharing his ideas and techniques publicly. If you have some time today, watch a few of his videos on his youtube channel, it's incredible to see his creation process in action: [LINK] For example, "Painting a character with maths" is mind-blowing and packed with SO MUCH educative content: this video
Great write up. If anyone wants to explore SDFs more, check out Inigo Quilez - he's a master of this stuff and a great explainer. Painting a Character with Maths: this video And plenty more on his website in article form: [LINK] Finally, Shadertoy, a graphics shader playground where you can see (and try!) a lot of this kind of stuff: [LINK]
This was a mind blowing example of math and art from last year - perhaps the live coding of the method was even more impressive than the outcome: this video
Agreed. Check out his incredible videos! Such as this mind-blowing one... this video "Painting a Selfie Girl, with Maths"