Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro

Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro(ctrl-alt-test.fr)

240 points by nbaksalyar 3 years ago | 37 comments

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 3 years ago | |

+1 to attending Revision 2023 (in Saarbrücken or online): 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 3 years 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.

rustybolt 3 years 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 3 years 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) and you should be able to find something that matches your interest.

77pt77 3 years ago |

Always impressed by projects of this kind.

One of the most impressive to me is kkrieger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

romwell 3 years ago | |

The tooling they wrote to make this kind of thing is absolutely insane too.

bmitc 3 years ago | | |

Do you have any interesting links regarding that?

kfrzcode 3 years ago | |

Holy, that brought me way back; direct line of nostalgia to my veins please thank you

kimburgess 3 years 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 is straight up pure magic.

laurentlb 3 years ago | |

You might enjoy checking 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 3 years 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

77pt77 3 years ago | | |

They have an Android app.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ldSRN

unwind 3 years 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?

laurentlb 3 years 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). 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

For the audio, we used the synth 64klang - https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang

unwind 3 years ago | | |

Great clarifications, thanks a lot!

richardjam73 3 years 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

Looking at F it appears to use OpenGL

TonyTrapp 3 years 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.

snthpy 3 years ago |

Is there a link to the demo on YouTube?

msk-lywenn 3 years 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=55737

bloqs 3 years ago | |

https://youtu.be/27PN1SsXbjM

Cockbrand 3 years ago | |

Yes, it’s embedded in the linked first part of the article series: http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463

andrewstuart 3 years ago |

It doesn't say what the environment is.

64K Commodore 64?

corysama 3 years 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 3 years 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).

laurentlb 3 years 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.

iamevn 3 years ago | |

Windows (presumably x86)

whizzter 3 years 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.

sylware 3 years ago |

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

egypturnash 3 years 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.

ar9av 3 years 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 3 years 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/).