[HN Gopher] Inigo Quilez: computer graphics, mathematics, shader...
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Inigo Quilez: computer graphics, mathematics, shaders, fractals,
demoscene
Author : federicoponzi
Score : 290 points
Date : 2025-05-18 09:32 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (iquilezles.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (iquilezles.org)
| rossant wrote:
| Inigo is a legend. Do check this out.
| emigre wrote:
| Check out 'Painting a Character with Maths' [1] (2020) by him,
| it's a very interesting video.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk
| deneas wrote:
| For an even longer video, just a few weeks ago he was
| interviewed on the Wookash podcast [1] where he also talked
| about 'Painting with Math'.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ax1iJTHFs
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Half of shadertoy favourites is iq.
| Moosturm wrote:
| Just took a look at the list and all I said out loud: WOW.
| ykl wrote:
| iq also happens to be one of the creators of ShaderToy; he's an
| absolute legend.
| ostwilkens wrote:
| IQ, along with shadertoy and hg_sdf are my learning resources for
| raymarching. A great way to get into demoscene production.
| Tomte wrote:
| > hg_sdf
|
| What is that?
| pixelpoet wrote:
| A great library of Signed Distance Functions (SDF) by the
| unbelievably awesome demogroup Mercury
| seritools wrote:
| https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/
| danielbarla wrote:
| It's genuinely insane what quality of learning material is
| available these days for free, and how conveniently it is
| packaged. Kudos to Inigo.
| ykl wrote:
| I had the incredible good fortune to cross paths with iq at
| Pixar; I was an intern while he was developing the Wondermoss
| procedural vegetation system for Brave. A bunch of us interns
| were already fans of his work from the demoscene world and upon
| learning this, he was kind enough to put together a special
| lecture for the interns on procedural graphics and the work he
| was doing for Wondermoss. That was one of the best and most mind-
| blowing lectures I've ever seen- for every concept he would
| discuss in the lecture, he would live-code a demo in front of us
| (this was before ShaderToy was a thing, so live-coding was
| something nobody had ever really seen before), and halfway
| through the lecture he revealed that the text editor he was using
| was built on top of his realtime live editing graphics system and
| therefore could be live-coded as well. One of the things he
| showed us was an early version of what eventually became the
| BeautyPi tech demo [0]; keep in mind that this still looks
| incredible today and iq was demoing this for us interns in
| realtime 14 years ago.
|
| Wondermoss was a spectacular piece of tech. Every single forest
| scene and every single piece of vegetation in Brave is made using
| Wondermoss, and it was all procedural- when you'd open up a shot
| from Brave in Menv30, you'd see just the characters and
| groundplane and very little else, and then you'd fire up the
| renderer and a huge vast lush forest would appear at rendertime.
| The even cooler thing was that since Brave was still using REYES
| RenderMan, iq took advantage of the REYES algorithm's streaming
| behavior to make Wondermoss not only generate but also discard
| vegetation on-the-fly, meaning that Wondermoss used vanishingly
| little memory. If I remember correctly, Wondermoss only added
| like a few dozen MB of memory usage at most to each render, which
| was insane since it was responsible for like 95% of the visual
| complexity of each frame. One fun quirk of Wondermoss was that
| the default random seed was iq's phone number, and that remained
| for quite a number of years, meaning his phone number is forever
| immortalized in pretty much all of Pixar's films from the 2010s.
|
| iq is one of the smartest and most inspiring people I've ever
| met.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9CZ9UgrcZU
| emigre wrote:
| This is awesome, thanks for sharing this story.
| kibibu wrote:
| The sting in the phone number tale is that, at one point, he
| changed his phone number and suddenly all the vegetation
| changed when scenes were re-rendered.
| motbus3 wrote:
| the only mistake iq has ever done in his whole life was to read
| youtube comments in his amazing videos.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What happened when he did that?
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| He hasn't made one in 3 years, so probably that:
| https://www.youtube.com/@InigoQuilez/videos
| uwagar wrote:
| what effect did that have?
| JBits wrote:
| What sort of tech/techniques did wondermoss use? Was it
| generating polygons?
| ingenieros wrote:
| It's all shaders! That's why they take up so little memory
| space. Here's a video where IQ explains how to "model" a
| greek temple using this technique:
| https://youtu.be/-pdSjBPH3zM?t=303
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| And here's a very high-level video about wondermoss in
| particular (archive.org link since the original appears to
| have been removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20140718035
| 429/https://www.youtu...
| onename wrote:
| When I want to show people what an intro is and tell them a bit
| about the demoscene, I usually show them the intro Elevated,
| which won the PC 4k compo at Breakpoint 2009. For me it really
| shows the talent of Iq and the other people who created it. It's
| truly amazing what can be done in just 4 kilobyte!
|
| Elevated by Rgba & TBC:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
|
| Iq's slides on the Elevated intro:
| https://iquilezles.org/articles/function2009/function2009.pd...
|
| Sourcecode:
| https://files.scene.org/view/resources/code/sources/rgba_tbc...
| jsheard wrote:
| He also ported Elevated to ShaderToy so you can fiddle with the
| code in realtime.
|
| https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdX3Rr
|
| If anyone's interested in seeing more 4kb demos, check out the
| recently released _Hexer_ by LJ.
|
| https://pouet.net/prod.php?which=103982
| gxd wrote:
| I was a huge fan of the demoscene growing up and IQ is one of the
| best. When my son was little, he loved watching demos on Youtube
| (a geek's version of Baby Einstein)!
|
| I like the scene so much, I explicitly mention it in my upcoming
| narrative game Outsider
| (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/). The main
| character was an active member of the BBS/pirate scene in the 90s
| and also a big demoscene fan!
| eloycoto wrote:
| Inigo, just If you're reading this, just say thanks for all your
| articles. During a tumour treatment I had a lot of fun reading
| all your material, and it made my life much much much fun.
|
| If you are around Galicia any time, you have a free dinner!
|
| Many thanks!
| binary132 wrote:
| One of my favorite websites ever. I often tell people about him.
| I really hope his youtube channel takes off.
| modeless wrote:
| Inigo was just recently on the Wookash podcast. A great commute
| listen: https://youtu.be/F1ax1iJTHFs
| ramesh31 wrote:
| There aren't many real geniuses out there now, but he is one of
| them. The Good Dinosaur is still one of Pixar's most gorgeous
| looking movies to this day.
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