Make a Tiny Planet

Dynamic procedural worlds have limitless detail to explore and can surprise even their creators. We show graphics shader code develped step by step.

Minecraft and No Man's Sky are two examples of great games built entirely on procedural generation and detailed simulation. slides

In this talk I first describe realtime ray tracing of implicit surfaces and give a tour of the Shadertoy online playground for real-time graphics exploration. I then show how I art directed and implemented the popular "Tiny Planet" real-time demo using procedural generation, dynamic simulation, and ray tracing, all implemented as 600 lines of GPU shader code.

Attendees with a year of programming experience will be able to immediately begin their own experiments in procedural content and ray tracing online after the talk, supported by links from the slides and follow-up details in the Graphics Codex.