Syntopia

Shader Toy

For some time I’ve been wanting to play around with pixel (fragment) shaders, but I couldn’t find a proper playground.
Then I stumbled upon Shader Toy, by Inigo Quilez (whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). A couple of things make Shader Toy stand out:

It runs inside your browser. It uses the emerging WebGL standard, [...]

Generative Art Links

This is a list of tools, resources, sites, and blogs related to Generative Art.
Generative Art Software
General-Purpose Software

Processing is probably the most used platform for Generative Art. It is an “open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities”. Java-based. There is also a [...]

Mandelbulb Implementations

Several implementations have appeared since the Mandelbulb surfaced a couple of months ago.
The first public GPU implementation I know of was created by ‘cbuchner1′. It is based on a sample from NVIDIAs OptiX SDK, and features anaglyphic 3D, ambient occlusion, phong shading, reflection, and environment maps. It can be downloaded here (Windows only and requires [...]

Mandelbulb

A lot of sites have reported that a new, interesting 3D version of the Mandelbrot set has been discovered. The Mandelbulb has aesthetic qualities similar to Quaternion-Julia sets, but seems more diverse and suited for exploration.

“Cave of Lost Secrets” from Skytopia.
Skytopia has a great overview complete with many stunning images.
A good way to view the [...]

Quaternion Julia sets and GPU computation.

Subblue has released another impressive Pixel Bender plugin, this time a Quaternion Julia set renderer.

The plugin can be downloaded here.
Quaternions are extensions of the complex numbers with four independent components. Quaternion Julia sets still explore the convergence of the system z ← z2 + c, but this time z and c are allowed to [...]

Generative Art in 4KB

Once again I’m extremely impressed by what shows up on the demoscene.
Slisesix – Generative Art in 4K
Inigo Quilez managed to create the following picture within a 4KB executable. In fact he managed to fit a renderer and the generative code for both the scene and the textures in only 3900 bytes.
More info (and executables) here.