Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013) (acko.net)
134 points by reledi on Nov 7, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


IT's worth linking directly to the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNO_CYUjMK8

(Also, after the first few slides in the animation, there are some pretty cool animations).


Everything I've ever encountered on acko.net has been amazing.

My favorite: http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory/


Great read with amazing presentation. Thanks for the link!


Beautiful!

I don't have much more to add unfortunately. Love the approach.


Really good slides. I should watch the talk.

It's a pet peeve of mine for people to suggest blurring as a "fix" to aliasing problems. Hacks are fine for one-offs, but I love how this clearly shows it's a sampling problem and what tools can do to address it.


I'm looking for some resources for signed distance functions and something beyond min,max etc. I'm aware of iq's website and all the things that have "made rounds" around internet.


Hard to know what to suggest as you make it sound a bit like you've seen everything! If you've read everything on iq's site and followed all the links then you've covered a lot of the the available material.

This is a gold mine: http://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/

Beyond that - just going through everything you can find on Shadertoy line by line.


I’ve done that but I feel like I’m still lacking some theoretical foundation. It might just be practice. Im aware of that project, it’s dope but I guess my question is how do I go from boxes to the insane shit lol.

E.g I’m not super comfortable creating my own sdfs that aren’t just a combination of the geometries from hg.


> E.g I’m not super comfortable creating my own sdfs that aren’t just a combination of the geometries from hg.

Leaving aside complex fractals - isn't it all about combining simple primitives? It's a bit like saying "I understand the basic chords but how do I write a song?"

The basic ingredients are shapes and domain transforms of various kinds. The rest is artistry.


Hg (http://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/) is a great resource. I'm not a fan of the non-commercial license. The intro on the top of the site has a lot of great links to resources outside of iq, including the pouet.net thread on Raymarching, John Hart's original sphere tracing paper, and enhanced sphere tracing, as well as the author's original talk from NVScene 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8nFqwOho-s). Definitely check out all of these resources.

If you're more interested in signed distance fields outside of the shadertoy\demo scene use cases there are a lot of interesting resources out there written by people using them in more complex contexts. Alex Evans (Media Molecule) Dreams talk is awesome. You can see the talk here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI) and read the slides here (http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...).

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015455/Advanced-Procedural-Re... covers how to generate meshes. With modern hardware with ballot\shuffle there are probably more efficient ways to do this in a compute shader now, but the talk is still good.

Epic games siggraph presentation (http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/DynamicOcclusion...) is a good explanation of how UE4 uses signed distance fields for ambient occlusion and shadows.

Q-Games presentation (http://fumufumu.q-games.com/archives/TheTechnologyOfTomorrow...) on how the now defunct Game Tomorrow Children uses signed distance fields for dynamic world space reflections.

Voxel Quest (http://www.voxelquest.com/), a "failed" kickstarter project, has some good write ups of how he's built the engine over the years as well as source code.

Unbound.io gave a talk at GTC 2017 (http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2017/presentation/s7777...) that goes into some detail on their signed distance field VR sculpting app.

There are of course more resources than that, and just browsing shader toy and reading people's shaders can give you a ton of knowledge, but that's the short list of resources that I've found enlightening over the years.


Thanks this looks like a really solid list.


Gah, I saw a youtube video where someone walked you through signed distance fields live. It was really great. Keep Googling, you'll find it! Good luck!



I guess by "Dance," he's means the slow dance, because visiting the site pegs my CPU 100% and none of the controls work.


Your probably using a computer without a graphics card, or at the very least it's hidden to your browser.


Do you have an old computer? I ask because this works absolutely fine on my phone - so I'd expect any recent computer to be able to handle WebGL


4 year old MacBook Pro running recent Safari. Not a particularly old or exotic configuration.


Anybody knows where can I learn about the math(probably linear algebra) that is used to convert 3d models from object space to 2d screen space?




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact