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Painting a Character with Maths

Inigo Quilez · 457.8K views · 2020-11-28 · 24:46

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Overview

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

On Hacker News

HN repeatedly calls it a mind-blowing and accessible introduction to SDFs and procedural art from a master explainer.

Recommended by 13 HN people across 10 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

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What people said

dgellow · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

I see a Inigo Quilez link, I upvote! He's one of those incredible artist-engineer out there always pushing boundaries further and sharing his ideas and techniques publicly. If you have some time today, watch a few of his videos on his youtube channel, it's incredible to see his creation process in action: [LINK] For example, "Painting a character with maths" is mind-blowing and packed with SO MUCH educative content: [VIDEO]

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nighthawk454 · 2022-12 · Strong recommendation

Great write up. If anyone wants to explore SDFs more, check out Inigo Quilez - he's a master of this stuff and a great explainer. Painting a Character with Maths: [VIDEO] And plenty more on his website in article form: [LINK] Finally, Shadertoy, a graphics shader playground where you can see (and try!) a lot of this kind of stuff: [LINK]

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gregsadetsky · 2021-08 · Strong recommendation

Agreed. Check out his incredible videos! Such as this mind-blowing one... [VIDEO] "Painting a Selfie Girl, with Maths"

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Sources

Video by Inigo Quilez, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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