THE VIDEO SHELF · signed distance fields
Painting a Character with Maths
Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN repeatedly calls it a mind-blowing and accessible introduction to SDFs and procedural art from a master explainer.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Inigo Quilez
- Topic
- signed distance fields
- Format
- tutorial
- Level
- intermediate
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 13
- HN mentions in dataset
- 19
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2021–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
This was a mind blowing example of math and art from last year - perhaps the live coding of the method was even more impressive than the outcome: [VIDEO]
kn8a on Hacker News · 2021-01
In 2020 Mathematical Art ExhibitionIf you don't have an understanding of signed distance fields, [VIDEO] is an amazing demo of their power. There are more videos about the fundamentals of SDFs at [LINK] The interesting thing about this paper is that they replace the mathematical SDF with a neural …
sxp on Hacker News · 2021-01
In Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering with Implicit 3D SurfacesAgreed. Check out his incredible videos! Such as this mind-blowing one... [VIDEO] "Painting a Selfie Girl, with Maths"
gregsadetsky on Hacker News · 2021-08
In Fishdraw: Procedurally Generated Fish Drawings
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.