Exploring the fractal reef

The atomic structure of fractals

It's really fun to explore fractals this way tdhooper.github.io/offline-shad...

One of the tedious aspects of modeling SDFs with raw shader code is adjusting the position of objects, so I'm adding transform gizmos into my tool

They write changes directly to the shader on disk, so I don't need an external object hierarchy

tdhooper.github.io/offline-shad...

Once we've put all that together we can have some fun with it ;) here's the shader used to make these gifs www.shadertoy.com/view/lf3BDr

Finally we just need to scale exponentially instead of linearly

Notice there is a point that the fractal converges on, if we rotate around that, it looks better but there's still a little jump

I've a method for finding this point of convergence here www.shadertoy.com/view/tscBDH

We can try linearly interpolating from one transform to the next, it loops, but it's not continuous

Let's look at the problem in 2D, we want to achieve this, moving from one face to the next in a smooth continuous movement

Which we use to tile the face with hexagons, I'm using a variation of this technique from Matt Zucker www.shadertoy.com/view/4d2GzV, it gives you the closest hexagon centers in 2D, which I then project onto the face in 3D by reversing the steps I used to make the uv-map

From these two points, we can construct a little uv-map for the section of the icosahedron face we're near

We can speed things up by just calculating distance to the tile we're near, or even better, just the tile-corner we're near

I fragment the head into little hexagon tiles, so how do we find the distance to the closest tile from some position in space? We could loop through a list of tile positions, calculate the SDF for each one, and return the smallest distance... but this becomes expensive for all those march iterations

Before I continue, a primer on ray marching SDFs:

While ray marching, you take your current position on the ray, with which query the SDF for the distance to the geometry surface, and step forward along the ray by that distance. Eventually you either converge onto the surface, or shoot past it

Creating a realistic head this way, with just code, is no easy task. To make life easier I grabbed a polygonal modal from Daz 3D, and 'traced' it with my SDF

I made a couple of views to visualize the difference between the poly and sdf geometry, a left/right split, and a camera-depth comparison

The head is a distance field, mostly constructed using metaballs and a lot of smooth-blended CSG primitives, about 500 lines of glsl www.shadertoy.com/view/wlf3WX

Here we can see the primitives as they are blended together (Thanks teadrinker for this visualisation www.shadertoy.com/view/tlByzR)

Let's post some old work with a little behind-the-scenes

This loop, Fractal Polycephaly, won the 2019 Revision Demoparty animated GIF competition

It's rendered entirely within a raymarching shader, there's no polygonal geometry

Hi Bluesky!

With the sudden closure of Jumpship, I'm looking for a new role

I'm looking for anywhere I can make beautiful things with code, my ideal role would be a mix of graphics programming, technical art, and gameplay programming (or anything else interactive)