Inigo Quilez   ::     ::  
1402 blog posts, written between 2008 and 2016. These are mostly short observations, funny thoughts and word playing. Some are embarrasingly corny, some more deep. I keep it here mostly a little time capsule for myself, organized by month:



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December 2014
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flan
2014-12-30
baking flan is a good way to make the whole apartment smell like, flan.

recommended
2014-12-28
i no longer have regular underwear, i threw it all away. sexy underwear is way too much fun (and, indeed, sexier). recommended.
a chellenge - hierarchical voronoi
2014-12-26
Procedural content can be split in explicit and implicit. Implicit proceduralism is very powerful when it comes to managing complexity, for it allows to generate content without any significant memory footprint, or alternatively, without having to manage memory in clever ways. Perlin noise and regular Voronoi based methods are examples of such powerful methods. However, these methods tend to be local in nature, and they usually lack any global features of macrostructure. In the case of Voronoi in particular, generating implicit voronoi patterns is easy and well known in CG by using the virtual grid technique, such that no feature points need to be stored or sorted/organized in any map, making the evaluation time constant and the storage zero. However, this method only produces constant density of cells. And so, getting cells to clump in some areas while other parts of the space get wider cells has been unseen with implicit methods, as far as I know.

My colleague Philip from Bristol challenged me to think about the problem the other day. Five years ago we'd bounce such problem back and forth quite regularly. Those were really good days. I still miss it, so when he came to me with this issue of multiscale Voronoi, I jumped into it immediately. And despite nobody seemed to have worked on this before, the problem happened to have a not so complex solution. The puzzle was fun though, it took a good few hours to solve. The result was a Hierarchical Voronoi procedural pattern that is implicit. I can probably not underscore that quality enough.

As a test case for the technique, I made this image (of Rapunzel, as drawn by this German artist), where the cell are constructed by self splitting themselves into smaller cells on the fly at evaluation time - once more, there's no feature points of acceleration structures or memory used at all.



As usual, the realtime code is online and available: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xll3zX.
hipster control
2014-12-24
with the amount of hipsters in this city, i feel like they should invent a "hipster control" pill. just to avoid accidental infection by prolonged exposure to them.
missing it. a bit. sometimes.
2014-12-22
The best part of working in the city? Not having to take Bart. The worst part of working in the city? Not having to take Bart.
that guy
2014-12-20
if Vimeo was a person, it'd be that self important guy with thick glasses and weird hair and clothing that pretends to be deep and self aware who still doesn't get why nobody likes him.
one day
2014-12-18
The day we no longer have separate restrooms for men and women, that day I'll feel proud of our species.

we still are monkeys
the world was smaller
2014-12-16
when i was a kid the world was smaller.

and "korea" was a very distant place. or rather, a concept (and hence the double quotes). "korea" was about as distant as "interest rate", the "mitochondria" or "cleopatra". as you can see, i'm using distance to express depth of knowledge. in my world of thoughts, that made sense, and it still does.

i only knew about these double quoted things because i saw them in the books (or the encyclopedia, my favorite book back then). they didn't exist in any physical form in my world, and as concept they also didn't exist in any intellectual form i could manipulate. they were simply objects i was told existed, somewhere in the vacuum beyond the boundaries of my world.

that world of mine was just a few kilometers wide. it contained my family, nature, some music, festivities, school, stars, shame, snow, the milky way, puzzles, the ocean, pride, cloth, food, fear, the beach, maths, weekends, tales, people, desires, proportions, batteries, and all of the dreams and fantasies that belonged to my reality. and despite my ability to operate with abstraction was powerful back then, just as it is today, the volume of things i could feed it with was reduced to what i could find in that little world of mine, which was a few kilometers wide, and what my imagination could produce, which was a few kilometers high.

that wasn't that long ago, damn. i am still that kid i guess. it's only that with age i've add layers of myselfness to who i am, and i suppose my internal world is not so small anymore, it must few a few hundred kilometer wide now.

i stop my stream of thoughts for a moment. i'm sitting at the bar of a restaurant, waiting for this korean woman that i am meeting. i think i've lost sense of time, but it's okey, she's not here yet. i look at the watch, then i take a zip of water, and look around me first, and then to myself. yeah, definitely the world is not that small anymore.
flan
2014-12-14
the whole apartment smells like flan. i'm sure i'll have sweet dreams tonight.
still shocked
2014-12-12
i already suspected this people don't like water, but today i got a pretty visual evidence of it. due to the lens in the camera, this picture doesn't even capture all of the variety of drinks offered in this store. of which, only a couple of bottles at the very end where water.

i don't get it, water tastes and feels so much better than any of those stuff. i fell i'll never get it, perhaps one one needs to be risen here in order to understand it.

would they?
2014-12-10
i wonder if people would take me any less seriously if they knew i am replying to their emails late at night on my full body Pikachu costume pajama
square quarters
2014-12-08
Since (a+b)² = a² + 2ab + b², then ab = ( (a+b)² - a² - b² ) /2 = ( (a+b)² - (a-b)² - 2ab) )/2 = (a+b)²/4 - (a-b)²/4

Now, (a+b)²/4 - (a-b)²/4 seems to be like a difficult way to compute the product of a and b. Unless you have tables of square quarters computed in advanced, cause then all you need to do is three addition/subtractions. And this is pretty sweet, for example, if you are a Babilonian living 4000 years ago.

get over it
2014-12-06
People. Things are not cool just by the simple fact they are 3D printed.

Get over the technological novelty.
nested sines
2014-12-04
Speaking of maths, the other night I started coding with the intention of doing a very short technical experiment. I wanted to see how derivatives would behave after nested distortion, so I started deforming a sphere with some sine waves. Soon I realized the shape of the object was far more interesting than the experiment itself, so I ended up improvising this mathematical image. As usual, these things happen when you plan them less.

Open code and maths, plus the realtime animation here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ssSRX

just 2
2014-12-02
n + n = n · n, are numbers 0 and 2
n · n = n ^ n, are numbers 1 and 2
n + n = n · n = n ^ n, is just 2 alone


After addition, multiplication and exponentiation, the next operation is "tetration". And even then, n + n = n · n = n ^ n = n ^^ n only for 2