Square
2012 for Still
Realtime animation made of fractals.
This is quite a personal production and probably not everybody's coup of tea. We have been struggling with it for almost a year, when Pixtur started to experiment with Mandelbox formula used in Mad's 4kb intro "Hochenergiephysic". The idea, back then, was basically to make a distance field function fractal-demo without the 4k size restrictions. Basically focusing on the design and parameters and to see what comes out of this.
The inner light of mandel box (2012) - Early concept sketch / Paintover with Photohop
Fractal Details (2012) - Early concept sketch / Paintover with Photohop
Could be Architecture (2012) - Early test rendering
The awesome thing about sphere marching is that you can describe things that would be impossible to model with polygones: You can distort space, do boolean operations with fractals, smoothing blend objects, things like that. The price for that, however, is parameter madness: Change that parameter slightly and the scene explodes - literally.
Building a city be interacting domain repeated cubes (2012) - sketches
Fractal Coast (2012) - Early concept sketch / Paintover with Photohop
Inner Cube (2012) - Screenshot of Tooll2
Dissolving Structures (2012) - Screenshot of Tooll2
We almost dropped the idea because the performance was just not good enough. Luckily we later discovered Boxplorer by Rrrola and got some additional support from Seven. Eventually Pixtur fell in love with Wright & Bastard's tribute to Richie Spice, and the work on this started again. We missed Breakpoint and Evoke and finally released it at a small fine Party in Berlin.
So yes: Besides the background-sphere, there are no polygones in this demo. And yes, the shaders would have easily fit in to 64kb. But who cares? Been there done that.
Mother (2012) - Screenshot of a realtime animation
Dark City (2012) - Screenshot of a realtime animation
