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Description
I'm working on an "ellipsoid world-space mask." That means that it looks at a few bones that you set, creates an imaginary ellipse out of them in the world (as opposed to the screen, so there's depth), and masks pixels based on their position inside-- or outside-- of that ellipse. I did some research, but what I read wasn't easy to understand, so I'm just going to wing it. Kind of like I always do.

This is just an early step, one of the first. Don't have rotation, don't even have scaling. But somehow I thought it was beautiful anyways. Working on shaders like this is often interesting.

A couple of years ago-- it might even be a decade ago-- I was talking to a friend of mine about 3D programming. I hadn't done any at that point, but this friend is a professional programmer, and one of the smartest people I know. He said that he looked into 3D graphics programming once but thought it was boring. He said, "Somebody has already figured out how to render perfect water. There's nothing to add."

Now, when I'm making shaders, I think about that sometimes. Because, kind of, yeah, there is some really realistic water out there in video games. The first time you see it, your jaw drops. And nowadays it renders fast enough to be everywhere. it's like that with a lot of things. But my goal isn't realism anymore, it's imagination. Has anyone made the perfect shader for rendering water as seen in Hosai's Wave? Somebody could-- not me-- and it would be amazing. And it's not just about recreating other art techniques, it's about generating new art techniques, things that wouldn't be as practical without 3D rendering. It's like, everybody's all PBR these days. They want standardized materials, standardized rendering techniques, standardized texture types. That's great for streamlining the industrial process of making video games and special effects for movies. But, in a way, it's poison for art, as if people had abandoned painting when they discovered photography. You can see this more and more, games look great, but they almost all look the same.

It's like that UV array object I made. I realized it wouldn't do the "right" thing. But I didn't know exactly what it would do. So I had to make it. (I think I know how to make an infinite hallway now, but it doesn't seem as interesting to me as it did then.) There's a lot that doesn't turn out how I intended, but that's part of the fun, it's part of discovery.

Description
I'm working on an "ellipsoid world-space mask." That means that it looks at a few bones that you set, creates an imaginary ellipse out of them in the world (as opposed to the screen, so there's depth), and masks pixels based on their position inside-- or outside-- of that ellipse. I did some research, but what I read wasn't easy to understand, so I'm just going to wing it. Kind of like I always do.

This is just an early step, one of the first. Don't have rotation, don't even have scaling. But somehow I thought it was beautiful anyways. Working on shaders like this is often interesting.

A couple of years ago-- it might even be a decade ago-- I was talking to a friend of mine about 3D programming. I hadn't done any at that point, but this friend is a professional programmer, and one of the smartest people I know. He said that he looked into 3D graphics programming once but thought it was boring. He said, "Somebody has already figured out how to render perfect water. There's nothing to add."

Now, when I'm making shaders, I think about that sometimes. Because, kind of, yeah, there is some really realistic water out there in video games. The first time you see it, your jaw drops. And nowadays it renders fast enough to be everywhere. it's like that with a lot of things. But my goal isn't realism anymore, it's imagination. Has anyone made the perfect shader for rendering water as seen in Hosai's Wave? Somebody could-- not me-- and it would be amazing. And it's not just about recreating other art techniques, it's about generating new art techniques, things that wouldn't be as practical without 3D rendering. It's like, everybody's all PBR these days. They want standardized materials, standardized rendering techniques, standardized texture types. That's great for streamlining the industrial process of making video games and special effects for movies. But, in a way, it's poison for art, as if people had abandoned painting when they discovered photography. You can see this more and more, games look great, but they almost all look the same.

It's like that UV array object I made. I realized it wouldn't do the "right" thing. But I didn't know exactly what it would do. So I had to make it. (I think I know how to make an infinite hallway now, but it doesn't seem as interesting to me as it did then.) There's a lot that doesn't turn out how I intended, but that's part of the fun, it's part of discovery.