I wonder if the artist is an example of a "10x programmer" in this particular niche, even just for the fact that only a small percentage of programmers has this level of artistic fluency.
Absolutely and without question. I’d argue he surpasses the normal meanings behind 10x, and is one of the super-rare people up in the stratosphere. Not because of the code itself (though his combination of math, code, and art skills are 10x on their own), but more because of his goals and it’s effects on other people. Inigo Quilez is one of the most famous demo scene programmers, one of the authors of ShaderToy, has one of the best sets of graphics programming articles on the net (https://iquilezles.org/articles/) and he has been focused on sharing ideas and getting other people to share ideas. His level of knowledge and code influence on other people, if you tried to measure it, which you can’t, but it would be more than thousands of times more productive than a single programmer.
I haven’t looked around a lot, but does anyone know what Inigo’s video production process & tools are? He’s got a lot of shots in the video I’m not sure how I’d make, and I’ve love to know how much custom software he’s writing just for the video making.
I’ve tried painting with maths as he likes calling it, on ShaderToy… for many hundreds of hours. It’s always more difficult both technically and artistically to get the image in my head to show up on screen. Sometimes I wonder if I need to allow things to happen more organically, to try things and run with whatever works, but I rarely work that way. Maybe sticking too closely to something I have in mind in advance makes me aim for unrealistic looks that SDFs aren’t good at. Or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough. I don’t know. Inigo makes it looks easy though.
Another thing that’s really fun to do is deconstruct his shaders piece by piece, or unpaint the character. It’s very enlightening in a different way than his construction videos. I’ve done this for the shader in the video here, as well as a few of his other shaders, and I always learn things. It always strikes me how close to the edge of the illusion his shaders are, how well they play to the camera and how quickly they look bad with tiny changes. It’s a master class in efficiency of design.
