Code golfing a tiny demo using maths and a pinch of insanity
15 hours ago
- #Ray Marching
- #Procedural Generation
- #GLSL
- The article describes a compact GLSL demo that fits into 464 characters, showcasing procedural mathematical art.
- The demo uses a fragment shader to generate a 3D scene with mountains, clouds, and fog without textures or meshes.
- Key techniques include noise generation using sine waves, ray-marching for volumetric effects, and camera setup.
- The noise function is optimized for performance and size, using accumulated sine waves for mountains and clouds.
- Ray-marching is used for both solid objects (mountains) and volumetric effects (clouds and fog).
- The camera setup is simplified to minimize code, using a normalized ray direction for rendering.
- Color and lighting effects are added to enhance the visual appeal, including tone mapping with tanh().
- The article details the step-by-step optimization process to reduce the code to its minimal form.
- The final code combines all elements into a single, highly optimized loop for maximum compactness.