abnormal about computers

the easiest way is to use Shadertoy. this basically gives you an environment where you're rendering with just a fragment shader based off the coordinate. there's even a shader that is an interactive tutorial for making a raymarching shader, which is a kind of nuts thing to exist.

for loads of fantastic information on SDFs, useful primitives, cool examples etc, check out Inigo Quilez's site. he's also got some of the most impressive examples I've seen.

if you want to get raymarching running in an existing game engine... well, I only have a a Unity specific rec, but: I have been very impressed by uRaymarching by hecomi. this lets you skip over the boilerplate of marching rays yourself and get straight to writing SDFs and post processing. it's got a lot of nice features like depth writing (so it intersects properly with rasterised geometry), receiving shadows from shadowmaps and even casting shadows from raymarched shapes, and the option to confine your rays inside a box. seems pretty performant from my testing so far.

UV progress... taking a break from the horrors of unwrapping to make a rough draft of her face.

I wanted to do a 256x256 texture and it was 128x128. oopsies (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)

[Artfight 2023] [14]

Corrupted One

First I draw the individual parts in a 2d art program, in this case procreate. I put an overlay texture that gives it some grittiness. As you can see I separated out the parts I planned to move a little bit, like the top and bottom jaw, eyes, wings, and body segments.

Each part of the texture is applied to a 2d plane through uv maps with the exception of the halo, which is 3d modeled.

The 2d planes are layered in a way that will create shadow when a light is added and avoid overlaps when rendered. This also really lends to the papercut aspect!

Animation for this particular piece is done through something called “shape keys” where blender will interpolate movement based on me slightly moving the individual parts.

I created several keys for different areas of motion. When all are combined it creates a nice effect. Some parts move smoother than others - this is due to me setting some keys to be “constant” instead of “bezier smoothed”.

(Oh also the halo is just rotated on an axis - 3d go brrrrr)

After rendering all the frames into a gif, I then threw it into a video editor to make the colors more contrasted and to add slight glitching and behold! Final product!