Someone once shared link here on HN of a collaborative code golf demo of a simple scene with sun, ocean and moving god rays of alternating color. You could see the code shortening while demo looking the same. At one point it changed from colorful demo to ascii of the same scene with even shorter code. I remember bookmarking it somewhere to see how it evolves further but lost where I saved it.
There’s something very aesthetically amusing about these shaders fitting into tweets, and those tweets also having videos attached which very roughly approximate the same information using many orders of magnitude more data.
Now is a great time to mention dwitter[0], where people post "dweets", trying to draw and animate interesting visual effects with a limit of 140 characters.
These? No, they’re too short, and often simplified to the point of being highly specific to exactly the given view. Many shaders on shadertoy will read mouse position; what the author does with it is up to them!
You could certainly try cloning the examples and messing with them: turning some number between 0 and 1 in the code into (mouseX/screenwidth) could prove interesting!
Most of these sites have a culture of learning from modifying and remixing other examples; just give credit where due
In the picture with rainbow bars the leftmost one looks a lot like a palette you get from photoelastic deformation (or a turning polarizer viewed from the "wrong" side)
Wow. Lots of amazing stuff in there. It's mind boggling how that stuff is not "really" doing 3D but is nonetheless a seemingly consistent rendering (i.e. 2D projection) of a true 3D shape, that could theoretically be converted to wireframe model.
Someone once shared link here on HN of a collaborative code golf demo of a simple scene with sun, ocean and moving god rays of alternating color. You could see the code shortening while demo looking the same. At one point it changed from colorful demo to ascii of the same scene with even shorter code. I remember bookmarking it somewhere to see how it evolves further but lost where I saved it.
God rays are also called “crepuscular rays” and you can see the Arizona state flag (or many desert sunsets) for an example.
Never hear them called god rays but I get it.
I would be very interested in seeing this if someone else happens to have the link!
There’s something very aesthetically amusing about these shaders fitting into tweets, and those tweets also having videos attached which very roughly approximate the same information using many orders of magnitude more data.
Now is a great time to mention dwitter[0], where people post "dweets", trying to draw and animate interesting visual effects with a limit of 140 characters.
[0] https://www.dwitter.net/
I love how these look, but is there a way to interact with them (move the camera)? I want to explore them but I assume that breaks the illusion.
These? No, they’re too short, and often simplified to the point of being highly specific to exactly the given view. Many shaders on shadertoy will read mouse position; what the author does with it is up to them!
You could certainly try cloning the examples and messing with them: turning some number between 0 and 1 in the code into (mouseX/screenwidth) could prove interesting!
Most of these sites have a culture of learning from modifying and remixing other examples; just give credit where due
Shaders are something I'm largely unfamiliar with but want to learn more. I'll check out shadertoy, thanks!
Curious! Tweets render in Chrome but not Firefox.
Try turning off Enhanced Tracking Protection. I've noticed lately it breaks a lot of sites.
Yes. Found shield icon beside the lock and it specific block twitter(X).
Xor is a wizard.
Wonder can you use this for say game of life and other social simulation ?
In the picture with rainbow bars the leftmost one looks a lot like a palette you get from photoelastic deformation (or a turning polarizer viewed from the "wrong" side)
crikey – https://tympanus.net/codrops/2025/02/18/rendering-the-simula...
Wow. Lots of amazing stuff in there. It's mind boggling how that stuff is not "really" doing 3D but is nonetheless a seemingly consistent rendering (i.e. 2D projection) of a true 3D shape, that could theoretically be converted to wireframe model.