6 ms·

Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro

240 points by nbaksalyar 4y ago

ar9av 4y ago
Wow, I've bookmarked the article for future reference, this is all very cool! I have been working in OpenGL recently on procedural meshes, particularly with L-Systems. My method for drawing branching structures was basically the same as the "Extruding" action the article talks about. The rotating of the splines around an axis is very clever! I am definitely going to use that.
- laurentlb 4y ago
  L-Systems are indeed a very good way to get started. We didn't mention it in this article, but it could have been part of the first section. Our demo with cubes intensively used L-systems to organize and animate the cubes (it was briefly mentioned in the making-of - https://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2010/behind-incubation/ https://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2010/behind-incubation/).
sylware 4y ago
I wonder how to train a large neural net in order to "diffuse" 3D mesh and animations.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  If you wanted to use this for a 64k demo then your next trick would be figuring out how to cram it into less than that - you need room for all the code that actually uses the models, as well as the sound, sequencing, and whatnot.
77pt77 4y ago
Always impressed by projects of this kind. One of the most impressive to me is kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  Holy, that brought me way back; direct line of nostalgia to my veins please thank you
- romwell 4y ago
  The tooling they wrote to make this kind of thing is absolutely insane too.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Do you have any interesting links regarding that?
    - khm 4y ago
      https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public is the best place to start
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      werkzeug3 source code https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/werkkzeug3 https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/werkkzeu... Source release announcement can be seen on an old copy of their main page https://web.archive.org/web/20210126032752/http://farbrausch.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210126032752/http://farbrausch... > Excerpt from the README: > This is it. Pretty much a history of Farbrausch tools 2001-2011. We've been meaning to release all this for ages, in various forms, and always ended up not doing it because "we'd just have to clean it up a bit first...". > No more. This is not cleaned up. This is the raw deal, some from old hard drives, some fresh from various SVN repositories. This is code written for a bunch of different versions of Visual Studio. Some of it is really tricky to compile, some really easy. There's some nice clean stuff there, other parts are just a complete mess. > All of this is released either under a BSD license or put in the public domain (stated per project). Not that you're likely to want to use most of this code, but if you want to, we see no reason to keep you. And they also point out: > There's still some stuff missing (most prominently Werkkzeug 4) but we'll add this in the near future. Here are some screenshots of werkzeug4 from some 2010 blogposts of theirs: https://web.archive.org/web/20160327151958/http://farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_12__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20160327151958/http://farbrausch... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053110/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_20__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053110/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_26__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_29__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053100/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_33__s_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053100/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053058/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_34__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053058/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_39__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_41__b_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_42__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... You can see more pictures, and accompanying texts in the blog posts at https://web.archive.org/web/20140815050229/http://www.farbrausch.com/blog&which=9.py https://web.archive.org/web/20140815050229/http://www.farbra... Tangentially, from their FAQ: > why does this website look so familiar? > we want to thank the pouet team for allowing us to rip their web design and graphics. > shaping our groups homepage in the style of pouet is surely confusing and a little bold, but we could not resist the temptation https://web.archive.org/web/20140815045911/http://www.farbrausch.com/faq.py https://web.archive.org/web/20140815045911/http://www.farbra...
andrewstuart 4y ago
It doesn't say what the environment is. 64K Commodore 64?
- corysama 4y ago
  In the demoscene, 4K and 64K “demos” are common conventions. They refer to programs that utilize built-in system libraries + 4 kilobytes or 64 kilobytes of custom code with no additional data.
  - whizzter 4y ago
    People more often talk about "4k intros" or "64k intros" to be clear (intros being size-restriced demos), often retro-people at events also but then people talk about the "C-64" in those cases (and the technologies and capabilities used is so different that it's hard to confuse the two in practice).
- iamevn 4y ago
  Windows (presumably x86)
  - whizzter 4y ago
    The article yes, many people use linux,osX or BSD though so some productions using them pop up from time to time even if the majority is windows based. Some people do 64k's (or 40k's) for old Amiga computers also but those have other constraints so generated meshes aren't as popular.
- laurentlb 4y ago
  It's for PC Windows (x86). You need a somewhat recent machine to run it, but my 7 year old laptop is doing fine. Estimated required spec for the graphics: NVidia GTX 680 (recommended: GTX 970 or equivalent) with 1GB VRAM.
snthpy 4y ago
Is there a link to the demo on YouTube?
- msk-lywenn 4y ago
  There are several links to the cited demos. On the right of the pouet page, you can find youtube links. eg. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69654 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69654 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55737 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55737
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  Yes, it’s embedded in the linked first part of the article series: http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463 http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463
- bloqs 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/27PN1SsXbjM https://youtu.be/27PN1SsXbjM
unwind 4y ago
Amazing. The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date. Does anyone know what the assumed rendering technology is? It's a Windows executable, so I guess it can use any Windows APIs for rendering and audio? Direct3D?
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  > The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date. At the bottom of the article, it mentions that it was released a few days ago.
- richardjam73 4y ago
  I found a github repository but it only goes A to F whereas in the demo in the article is a H. https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test Looking at F it appears to use OpenGL
- laurentlb 4y ago
  The intro was released in 2017. We published the first part of the making-of in 2018 (it was discussed on HackerNews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842576). A few days ago, I remembered I had an unpublished draft for meshes and decided to finalize it. We use OpenGL for rendering and the code is written in C++. We published the source code of other intros of GitHub. For example, this one should give you a good idea of how we do it (although we modernized our engine since that): https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F For the audio, we used the synth 64klang - https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang
  - unwind 4y ago
    Great clarifications, thanks a lot!
kimburgess 4y ago
On the topic of demo, honestly one of the communities I miss from the twitter downfall is one tweet shaders. As someone without a graphics background, almost everything on https://nitter.net/search?q=%23つぶやきGLSL https://nitter.net/search?q=%23つぶやきGLSL is straight up pure magic.
- laurentlb 4y ago
  You might enjoy checking https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/. The shaders there are likely to be longer than a tweet, but that also means they're more readable and it can be a good way to understand how they work.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    And, if we're suggesting Shadertoy, this video by one of its creators is probably worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    They have an Android app. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ldSRN https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ldSRN
_the_inflator 4y ago
If you are interested in learning demoscene stuff, Revision 2023 which is about to take place in roughly two weeks, features some workshops in this regard also available as online streams.
- laurentlb 4y ago
  +1 to attending Revision 2023 (in Saarbrücken or online): https://2023.revision-party.net/ https://2023.revision-party.net/ I'm the author of the article, and I'll be at Revision. I'll give a seminar on shader minification -- another topic not discussed in the article.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    Will there be open live streams for everyone to access this year also? I watched Revision live during most of the event and it was definitely a high-point for me. I want to go in person also some time, but not this year.
    - laurentlb 4y ago
      Yes.
      - codetrotter 4y ago
        Awesome :D
- rustybolt 4y ago
  Looks cool, any seminars/talks you recommend? Also, do you need a ticket to "attend remotely"? I can't find the answer on the site (it mentions a remote ticket but also that it's specifically for participating in competitions and voting).
  - laurentlb 4y ago
    You don't need a ticket to watch the streams. A ticket is needed if you want to take part in competitions (submit your own production) or take part in the votes. For seminars, I'd suggest to take a look at seminars from previous years. They are on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty/playlists https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty/playlists) and you should be able to find something that matches your interest.

240 points by nbaksalyar 4y ago

Wow, I've bookmarked the article for future reference, this is all very cool! I have been working in OpenGL recently on procedural meshes, particularly with L-Systems. My method for drawing branching structures was basically the same as the "Extruding" action the article talks about. The rotating of the splines around an axis is very clever! I am definitely going to use that.

laurentlb 4y ago
L-Systems are indeed a very good way to get started. We didn't mention it in this article, but it could have been part of the first section. Our demo with cubes intensively used L-systems to organize and animate the cubes (it was briefly mentioned in the making-of - https://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2010/behind-incubation/ https://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2010/behind-incubation/).

sylware 4y ago

I wonder how to train a large neural net in order to "diffuse" 3D mesh and animations.

egypturnash 4y ago
If you wanted to use this for a 64k demo then your next trick would be figuring out how to cram it into less than that - you need room for all the code that actually uses the models, as well as the sound, sequencing, and whatnot.

77pt77 4y ago

Always impressed by projects of this kind. One of the most impressive to me is kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

kfrzcode 4y ago
Holy, that brought me way back; direct line of nostalgia to my veins please thank you
romwell 4y ago
The tooling they wrote to make this kind of thing is absolutely insane too.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Do you have any interesting links regarding that?
  - khm 4y ago
    https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public is the best place to start
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    werkzeug3 source code https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/werkkzeug3 https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/werkkzeu... Source release announcement can be seen on an old copy of their main page https://web.archive.org/web/20210126032752/http://farbrausch.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210126032752/http://farbrausch... > Excerpt from the README: > This is it. Pretty much a history of Farbrausch tools 2001-2011. We've been meaning to release all this for ages, in various forms, and always ended up not doing it because "we'd just have to clean it up a bit first...". > No more. This is not cleaned up. This is the raw deal, some from old hard drives, some fresh from various SVN repositories. This is code written for a bunch of different versions of Visual Studio. Some of it is really tricky to compile, some really easy. There's some nice clean stuff there, other parts are just a complete mess. > All of this is released either under a BSD license or put in the public domain (stated per project). Not that you're likely to want to use most of this code, but if you want to, we see no reason to keep you. And they also point out: > There's still some stuff missing (most prominently Werkkzeug 4) but we'll add this in the near future. Here are some screenshots of werkzeug4 from some 2010 blogposts of theirs: https://web.archive.org/web/20160327151958/http://farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_12__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20160327151958/http://farbrausch... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053110/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_20__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053110/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_26__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_29__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053100/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_33__s_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053100/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053058/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_34__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053058/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_39__x_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_41__b_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbrausch.com/images/blog_9_post_42__a_1.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra... You can see more pictures, and accompanying texts in the blog posts at https://web.archive.org/web/20140815050229/http://www.farbrausch.com/blog&which=9.py https://web.archive.org/web/20140815050229/http://www.farbra... Tangentially, from their FAQ: > why does this website look so familiar? > we want to thank the pouet team for allowing us to rip their web design and graphics. > shaping our groups homepage in the style of pouet is surely confusing and a little bold, but we could not resist the temptation https://web.archive.org/web/20140815045911/http://www.farbrausch.com/faq.py https://web.archive.org/web/20140815045911/http://www.farbra...

andrewstuart 4y ago

It doesn't say what the environment is. 64K Commodore 64?

corysama 4y ago
In the demoscene, 4K and 64K “demos” are common conventions. They refer to programs that utilize built-in system libraries + 4 kilobytes or 64 kilobytes of custom code with no additional data.
- whizzter 4y ago
  People more often talk about "4k intros" or "64k intros" to be clear (intros being size-restriced demos), often retro-people at events also but then people talk about the "C-64" in those cases (and the technologies and capabilities used is so different that it's hard to confuse the two in practice).
iamevn 4y ago
Windows (presumably x86)
- whizzter 4y ago
  The article yes, many people use linux,osX or BSD though so some productions using them pop up from time to time even if the majority is windows based. Some people do 64k's (or 40k's) for old Amiga computers also but those have other constraints so generated meshes aren't as popular.
laurentlb 4y ago
It's for PC Windows (x86). You need a somewhat recent machine to run it, but my 7 year old laptop is doing fine. Estimated required spec for the graphics: NVidia GTX 680 (recommended: GTX 970 or equivalent) with 1GB VRAM.

snthpy 4y ago

Is there a link to the demo on YouTube?

msk-lywenn 4y ago
There are several links to the cited demos. On the right of the pouet page, you can find youtube links. eg. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69654 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69654 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55737 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55737
Cockbrand 4y ago
Yes, it’s embedded in the linked first part of the article series: http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463 http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463
bloqs 4y ago
https://youtu.be/27PN1SsXbjM https://youtu.be/27PN1SsXbjM

unwind 4y ago

Amazing. The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date. Does anyone know what the assumed rendering technology is? It's a Windows executable, so I guess it can use any Windows APIs for rendering and audio? Direct3D?

TonyTrapp 4y ago
> The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date. At the bottom of the article, it mentions that it was released a few days ago.
richardjam73 4y ago
I found a github repository but it only goes A to F whereas in the demo in the article is a H. https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test Looking at F it appears to use OpenGL
laurentlb 4y ago
The intro was released in 2017. We published the first part of the making-of in 2018 (it was discussed on HackerNews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842576). A few days ago, I remembered I had an unpublished draft for meshes and decided to finalize it. We use OpenGL for rendering and the code is written in C++. We published the source code of other intros of GitHub. For example, this one should give you a good idea of how we do it (although we modernized our engine since that): https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F For the audio, we used the synth 64klang - https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang
- unwind 4y ago
  Great clarifications, thanks a lot!

kimburgess 4y ago

On the topic of demo, honestly one of the communities I miss from the twitter downfall is one tweet shaders. As someone without a graphics background, almost everything on https://nitter.net/search?q=%23つぶやきGLSL https://nitter.net/search?q=%23つぶやきGLSL is straight up pure magic.

laurentlb 4y ago
You might enjoy checking https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/. The shaders there are likely to be longer than a tweet, but that also means they're more readable and it can be a good way to understand how they work.
- pdpi 4y ago
  And, if we're suggesting Shadertoy, this video by one of its creators is probably worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk
- 77pt77 4y ago
  They have an Android app. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ldSRN https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ldSRN

_the_inflator 4y ago

If you are interested in learning demoscene stuff, Revision 2023 which is about to take place in roughly two weeks, features some workshops in this regard also available as online streams.

laurentlb 4y ago
+1 to attending Revision 2023 (in Saarbrücken or online): https://2023.revision-party.net/ https://2023.revision-party.net/ I'm the author of the article, and I'll be at Revision. I'll give a seminar on shader minification -- another topic not discussed in the article.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Will there be open live streams for everyone to access this year also? I watched Revision live during most of the event and it was definitely a high-point for me. I want to go in person also some time, but not this year.
  - laurentlb 4y ago
    Yes.
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      Awesome :D
rustybolt 4y ago
Looks cool, any seminars/talks you recommend? Also, do you need a ticket to "attend remotely"? I can't find the answer on the site (it mentions a remote ticket but also that it's specifically for participating in competitions and voting).
- laurentlb 4y ago
  You don't need a ticket to watch the streams. A ticket is needed if you want to take part in competitions (submit your own production) or take part in the votes. For seminars, I'd suggest to take a look at seminars from previous years. They are on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty/playlists https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty/playlists) and you should be able to find something that matches your interest.