What is that?
Wondermoss was a spectacular piece of tech. Every single forest scene and every single piece of vegetation in Brave is made using Wondermoss, and it was all procedural- when you'd open up a shot from Brave in Menv30, you'd see just the characters and groundplane and very little else, and then you'd fire up the renderer and a huge vast lush forest would appear at rendertime. The even cooler thing was that since Brave was still using REYES RenderMan, iq took advantage of the REYES algorithm's streaming behavior to make Wondermoss not only generate but also discard vegetation on-the-fly, meaning that Wondermoss used vanishingly little memory. If I remember correctly, Wondermoss only added like a few dozen MB of memory usage at most to each render, which was insane since it was responsible for like 95% of the visual complexity of each frame. One fun quirk of Wondermoss was that the default random seed was iq's phone number, and that remained for quite a number of years, meaning his phone number is forever immortalized in pretty much all of Pixar's films from the 2010s.
iq is one of the smartest and most inspiring people I've ever met.
Elevated by Rgba & TBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
Iq's slides on the Elevated intro: https://iquilezles.org/articles/function2009/function2009.pd...
Sourcecode: https://files.scene.org/view/resources/code/sources/rgba_tbc...
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdX3Rr
If anyone's interested in seeing more 4kb demos, check out the recently released Hexer by LJ.
I like the scene so much, I explicitly mention it in my upcoming narrative game Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/). The main character was an active member of the BBS/pirate scene in the 90s and also a big demoscene fan!
If you are around Galicia any time, you have a free dinner!
Many thanks!
rossant•8mo ago