Ice Core (4KB Executable Graphics)
Released at Outline 2020, 4KB Executable Graphics (a single 4KB executable file generates this image, with no external data).
2nd demoscene release
I wanted to do something for Outline, but didn’t have a huge amount of time. I had a WIP shader of an ice core to hand, so I quickly put this together. It came last in the competition, but I liked it :)
Tech
There’s nothing particularly new here - it’s path traced glass again, but this time with the lighting set up to give nice caustics.
The ice core is just a glass cylinder sliced into sections. Each section has a random colour and roughness value to produce the varied ice layers.
There are also bubbles and particles within the ice. The geometry is an SDF, and the one nice trick I came up with here is the dark particles - I used p = fract(p); to repeat space, then placed a sphere at a random position in each cell.
Normally it’s important to keep the sphere inside the cell to avoid artefacts, but in this case such artefacts produce dark spots in the ice - which look like floating particles ;)