Painting a Character with Maths

Inigo Quilez
19 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2020–2025
YouTube
458K views · 5 years ago · demo · intermediate · evergreen

Inigo Quilez live-codes a portrait of a character in a shader, building the whole image from mathematical formulas and signed distance fields. He narrates the process, so viewers see how shapes, shading and color come from code.

HN points to it as the mind-blowing introduction to signed distance fields and to making art from pure math, with the live coding more impressive than the result.

“perhaps the live coding of the method was even more impressive than the outcome”
Shaders & real-time visualsGenerative artComputational & parametric design
#shaderart#signeddistancefields#livecoding#proceduralgraphics#mathart

25 comments from Hacker News

d
@dgellow2023 · in “Simple Pathtracing (2012)”
I see a Inigo Quilez link, I upvote! He's one of those incredible artist-engineer out there always pushing boundaries further and sharing his ideas and techniques publicly. If you have some time today, watch a few of his videos on his youtube channel, it's incredible to see his creation process in action: link For example, "Painting a character with maths" is mind-blowing and packed with SO MUCH educative content: ▶ this video
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@paulgb2022 · in “Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?”
His “Painting a Character with Maths” video is also incredibly mind-blowing. ▶ this video
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@ianthehenry2022 · in “Show HN: Make 3D art in your browser using Lisp and math”
Bauble is a toy that I've been working on for a few weeks, and I think it's reached the point where other people could have fun with it! Bauble is based on raymarching signed distance functions, which are kind of like... 3D vector art? They're pretty common in the procedural art community and you can do some amazing things with them, but normally writing SDFs means writing low-level shader code. I wanted to play with SDFs, but I found it very frustrating to translate "I want to rotate this" into "okay, that means I have to construct a rotation matrix, and then apply it to the current point, and then evaluate the shape...". So I made a high-level Janet DSL that compiles down to GLSL shader code so I could more easily play with mathematically defined shapes. For more about SDFs, this mind-blowing video is what got me interested in the first place, and shows you what they're capable of in the hands of an expert: ▶ this video
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k
@kn8a2021 · in “2020 Mathematical Art Exhibition”
This was a mind blowing example of math and art from last year - perhaps the live coding of the method was even more impressive than the outcome: ▶ this video
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r
@rozab2025 · in “LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers”
This is of course true, but have you ever seen Inigo Quilez's SDF renderings? It's certainly not scalable, but it sure is interesting ▶ this video
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@emigre2025 · in “Inigo Quilez: computer graphics, mathematics, shaders, fractals, demoscene”
Check out 'Painting a Character with Maths' [1] (2020) by him, it's a very interesting video. [1] ▶ this video
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@antegamisou2023 · in “Painting with math: A gentle study of raymarching”
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 - link Painting a Character with Maths - ▶ this video Bonus: Painting with Maths in Google Sheets - link
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g
@gcr2023 · in “The model for coins in Super Mario Odyssey is simpler than in Super Mario Galaxy”
Inigo Quilez does some incredible stuff with signed distance fields! Those don't use textures in the traditional sense, but see ▶ this video
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p
@pdpi2023 · in “Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro”
And, if we're suggesting Shadertoy, this video by one of its creators is probably worth watching: ▶ this video
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@nighthawk4542022 · in “Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python”
Great write up. If anyone wants to explore SDFs more, check out Inigo Quilez - he's a master of this stuff and a great explainer. Painting a Character with Maths: ▶ this video And plenty more on his website in article form: link Finally, Shadertoy, a graphics shader playground where you can see (and try!) a lot of this kind of stuff: link
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@lifthrasiir2022 · in “Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]”
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] ▶ this video [2] link
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b
@brundolf2022 · in “Sliderland – Creative coding with 64 HTML sliders”
It's very similar to writing shaders. Check out this video for some crazy stuff you can do with equations: ▶ this video
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