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Painting a Character with Maths

Inigo Quilez · tutorial · Watch on YouTube

Creative coding & generative artComputer graphics & rendering

What it is

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 Hacker News recommends it

HN repeatedly calls it a mind-blowing and accessible introduction to SDFs and procedural art from a master explainer.

  • 13 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 5 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “This was a mind blowing example of math and art from last year”

    Mind-blowing math art with live coding

    kn8a, 2021-01 · Strong recommendation · in “2020 Mathematical Art Exhibition”

  2. “is an amazing demo of their power.”

    Amazing demo of signed distance fields

    sxp, 2021-01 · Strong recommendation · in “Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering with Implicit 3D Surfaces”

  3. “Check out his incredible videos! Such as this mind-blowing one...”

    Mind-blowing painting of a girl with maths

    gregsadetsky, 2021-08 · Strong recommendation · in “Fishdraw: Procedurally Generated Fish Drawings”

  4. “he's a master of this stuff and a great explainer.”

    Master explainer of SDFs painting a character with maths

    nighthawk454, 2022-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python”

  5. “is mind-blowing and packed with SO MUCH educative content”

    Mind-blowing, packed with educational content on creating art with maths

    dgellow, 2023-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Simple Pathtracing”

  6. “It makes a full 3d complex scene out of a math formula, with step by step explanation”

    Builds a 3D scene from a formula step by step

    lligallo, 2021-01 · Recommendation · in “Graphtoy”

  7. “create a selfie of a girl from scratch using formulas here”

    Creation of a selfie from scratch using formulas

    dominicjj, 2021-04 · Recommendation · in “Condition: A 64KB WebGL Intro”

  8. “also has made in-depth videos [1] [2] which might be more accessible to who aren't familiar with shader languages”

    In-depth, accessible videos by Quilez

    lifthrasiir, 2022-05 · Recommendation · in “Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: sdf, shaders, shadertoy, procedural art, raymarching, glsl

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