I had the incredible good fortune to cross paths with iq at Pixar; I was an intern while he was developing the Wondermoss procedural vegetation system for Brave. A bunch of us interns were already fans of his work from the demoscene world and upon learning this, he was kind enough to put together a special lecture for the interns on procedural graphics and the work he was doing for Wondermoss. That was one of the best and most mind-blowing lectures I've ever seen- for every concept he would discuss in the lecture, he would live-code a demo in front of us (this was before ShaderToy was a thing, so live-coding was something nobody had ever really seen before), and halfway through the lecture he revealed that the text editor he was using was built on top of his realtime live editing graphics system and therefore could be live-coded as well.
One of the things he showed us was an early version of what eventually became the BeautyPi tech demo [0]; keep in mind that this still looks incredible today and iq was demoing this for us interns in realtime 14 years ago.
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.
The sting in the phone number tale is that, at one point, he changed his phone number and suddenly all the vegetation changed when scenes were re-rendered.
It's all shaders! That's why they take up so little memory space.
Here's a video where IQ explains how to "model" a greek temple using this technique: https://youtu.be/-pdSjBPH3zM?t=303
When I want to show people what an intro is and tell them a bit about the demoscene, I usually show them the intro Elevated, which won the PC 4k compo at Breakpoint 2009. For me it really shows the talent of Iq and the other people who created it. It’s truly amazing what can be done in just 4 kilobyte!
Inigo, just If you're reading this, just say thanks for all your articles. During a tumour treatment I had a lot of fun reading all your material, and it made my life much much much fun.
If you are around Galicia any time, you have a free dinner!
I was a huge fan of the demoscene growing up and IQ is one of the best. When my son was little, he loved watching demos on Youtube (a geek's version of Baby Einstein)!
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!
There aren't many real geniuses out there now, but he is one of them. The Good Dinosaur is still one of Pixar's most gorgeous looking movies to this day.
I had the incredible good fortune to cross paths with iq at Pixar; I was an intern while he was developing the Wondermoss procedural vegetation system for Brave. A bunch of us interns were already fans of his work from the demoscene world and upon learning this, he was kind enough to put together a special lecture for the interns on procedural graphics and the work he was doing for Wondermoss. That was one of the best and most mind-blowing lectures I've ever seen- for every concept he would discuss in the lecture, he would live-code a demo in front of us (this was before ShaderToy was a thing, so live-coding was something nobody had ever really seen before), and halfway through the lecture he revealed that the text editor he was using was built on top of his realtime live editing graphics system and therefore could be live-coded as well. One of the things he showed us was an early version of what eventually became the BeautyPi tech demo [0]; keep in mind that this still looks incredible today and iq was demoing this for us interns in realtime 14 years ago.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9CZ9UgrcZU
the only mistake iq has ever done in his whole life was to read youtube comments in his amazing videos.
What happened when he did that?
He hasn't made one in 3 years, so probably that: https://www.youtube.com/@InigoQuilez/videos
what effect did that have?
The sting in the phone number tale is that, at one point, he changed his phone number and suddenly all the vegetation changed when scenes were re-rendered.
What sort of tech/techniques did wondermoss use? Was it generating polygons?
It's all shaders! That's why they take up so little memory space. Here's a video where IQ explains how to "model" a greek temple using this technique: https://youtu.be/-pdSjBPH3zM?t=303
And here's a very high-level video about wondermoss in particular (archive.org link since the original appears to have been removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20140718035429/https://www.youtu...
This is awesome, thanks for sharing this story.
When I want to show people what an intro is and tell them a bit about the demoscene, I usually show them the intro Elevated, which won the PC 4k compo at Breakpoint 2009. For me it really shows the talent of Iq and the other people who created it. It’s truly amazing what can be done in just 4 kilobyte!
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...
He also ported Elevated to ShaderToy so you can fiddle with the code in realtime.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdX3Rr
If anyone's interested in seeing more 4kb demos, check out the recently released Hexer by LJ.
https://pouet.net/prod.php?which=103982
Check out 'Painting a Character with Maths' [1] (2020) by him, it's a very interesting video.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk
For an even longer video, just a few weeks ago he was interviewed on the Wookash podcast [1] where he also talked about 'Painting with Math'.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ax1iJTHFs
Inigo was just recently on the Wookash podcast. A great commute listen: https://youtu.be/F1ax1iJTHFs
Inigo, just If you're reading this, just say thanks for all your articles. During a tumour treatment I had a lot of fun reading all your material, and it made my life much much much fun.
If you are around Galicia any time, you have a free dinner!
Many thanks!
I was a huge fan of the demoscene growing up and IQ is one of the best. When my son was little, he loved watching demos on Youtube (a geek's version of Baby Einstein)!
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!
It's genuinely insane what quality of learning material is available these days for free, and how conveniently it is packaged. Kudos to Inigo.
Inigo is a legend. Do check this out.
One of my favorite websites ever. I often tell people about him. I really hope his youtube channel takes off.
Half of shadertoy favourites is iq.
iq also happens to be one of the creators of ShaderToy; he’s an absolute legend.
Just took a look at the list and all I said out loud: WOW.
IQ, along with shadertoy and hg_sdf are my learning resources for raymarching. A great way to get into demoscene production.
> hg_sdf
What is that?
A great library of Signed Distance Functions (SDF) by the unbelievably awesome demogroup Mercury
https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/
There aren't many real geniuses out there now, but he is one of them. The Good Dinosaur is still one of Pixar's most gorgeous looking movies to this day.