7 HN users recommended this tutorial7 months2022–2025score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters point to it as the best demonstration of procedural graphics from a master, accessible to beginners yet deep enough for advanced viewers.
Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.
“My favorite video of his is Painting a Landscape with Maths.” (HN, 2023)
Indeed, Inigo Quilez is "the guy" for this kind of stuff. He co-created ShaderToy and has worked on effects and modeling for multiple Pixar films. My favorite video of his is Painting a Landscape with Maths. [this video] He deserves to have at least as many subscribers as other math YouTube channels like Verisatium and 3Blue1Brown.
Inigo Quilez, the author of this slide, also has made in-depth videos [1] [2] which might be more accessible to who aren't familiar with shader languages. [1] [link] [2] [this video]
In-depth videos by Quilez, more accessible than slides
Thankfully for the graphics the very person who did the graphics in this Elevated demo is very generous with their time. Inigo Quilez has many instructional videos on his channel in how to code procedural graphics from the very beginner to the advanced. I link a couple of examples. You can watch the more advanced video even as a beginner but trying yourself is easier at the beginner level. Beginner. [link] Advanced. [this video] Website. [link]
Advanced instructional video on procedural graphics from the author of Elevated
Good to see high quality articles gaining traction. If the article looks too verbose, be sure to check out, as the author cites, Inigo Quilez's videos Painting a Landscape with Maths - [this video] Painting a Character with Maths - [link] Bonus: Painting with Maths in Google Sheets - [link]
Companion video on painting a landscape with maths
Welcome to the Internet, superMayo! If you want to see what the Masters can do with shaders, let me introduce you to Inigo Quilez and his shader art: [this video] EDIT: I did not notice you are the author of this article. It's very well done, and I've been looking for more approachable and interactive tutorials on the arts of shader coding.
I just finished watching a live-coding session (from 2 years ago) by Inigo Quilez (ex Pixar), where he constructs an entire ray-marched landscape using only maths (mostly SDFs) in pure GPU shader code. The stream: [this video] The demo: [link]
Live coding of a ray-marched landscape using only math in a shader
>It looks really good for such a simple algorithm. I love this! If you like that, you should check out Inigo Quilez [this video] Here is the shadertoy link with code [link]
Edit: Hey my bad the prompts for Genuary are all for making visuals, but I suppose they could be interpreted for audio too. My bad, but I'll leave my music-nerd rant below in tact in case anyone finds it useful ---------------- This is awesome, I didn't know about this but I've been subconsciously preparing for it over Christmas break. Here's what I've found useful: Music: - Eli Fieldsteel's intro to SuperCollider course is fantastic. SuperCollider language is kind of nice. Function literals are simply curly braces, `{}`, and the last expression is returned. It has pipe's for function arguments, so if you squint it kind of feels like Ruby or Rust. // a silly function. Note that paren "blocks" make evaluating multiple lines easier ( x = {|num| num.squared + 42 }; y = x.(0); ) If you've only ever used JavaScript, there's a lot of "wtf is this shit" moments, but otherwise it's really nice. I feel like SCLang is super powerful and want to use it for some projects. Here's Eli's course playlist: [link] - Sonic Pi is built on-top of SuperCollider, but it's MUCH easier to get started with making bleeps and bloops. Sam Aaron, who originally created Overtone (a Clojure front-end for SuperCollider) created Sonic Pi initially to teach kids computer programming and music, but now it's turning into a pretty nice live-coding setup. The language is basically a DSL extension of Ruby, and although it's very elegant, I feel like it's a little nerfed in terms of a full language when compared to
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