Signed Distance Functions
A short GLSL ray-marching experiment whose meta-blobs, once a Fresnel pass was added, ended up reading as wax in a lava lamp rather than the abstract fields they started as.
Overview
A short GLSL experiment over two days in August 2020, exploring ray-marching and signed distance fields (SDFs) to generate meta-blobs.
Concept
While iterating on the shader, I noticed the blobs' behaviour closely mirrored the fluid dynamics of wax inside a lava lamp — an unexpected parallel that ended up shaping the aesthetic direction rather than being corrected away. A Fresnel effect was added in a later pass to give the surfaces more visual depth.
Presentation
The custom shaders were adapted for print output, producing high-resolution stills from the same generative process rather than treating the work as screen-only.
Reflection
The lava-lamp read wasn't planned — it emerged from the ray-marching parameters themselves, and recognising it rather than smoothing it out is what gave the piece its identity.