Making of Ergon 4K PC Intro

You are not going to discover any fantastic trick here, the intro itself is not an outstanding coding performance, but I always enjoy reading the making of other intros, so It's time to take some time to put this on a paper!

What is Ergon? It's a small 4k intro (meaning 4096 byte executable) that was released at the 2010 Breakpoint demoparty (if you can't run it on your hardware, you can still watch it on youtube), which surprisingly was able to finish to the 3rd place! I did the coding, design and worked also on the music with my friend ulrick.

That was a great experience even if I didn't expect to work on this production at the beginning of the year... but at the end of January, when BP2010 was announced and supposed to be the last one, I was motivated to go there, and why not, release a 4k intro! One month and a half later, the demo was almost ready... wow, 3 weeks before the party, first time to finish something so ahead an event! But yep, I was able to work on it on part time during the week (and the night of course)... But when I started on it, I had no idea where this project would bring me to... or even what kind of 3D API I had to start from doing this intro!

Potatro, RayMarching and DistanceFields : a story of SphereTracing

The "Raymarching + Distancefields" is the technique which was most notably used in the majority of 4k intros released in 2009 (and still will have probably a strong influence in 2010). Within Frequency, xt95 introduced this technique thanks to the fantastic work of iq and Systemkit. When wullon asked Frequency to build a little intro to announce the construction of the demoscene.fr web site, xt95 produced a promising first draft of the Potratro from which i could work to improve the overall design, the "isos" forms and the scenes. Yet I had not taken the time to understand the principle of RayMarching + DistanceFields, even if it did not seem to be totally abscond.

Back from the #main 2009, while i looked at the BBS pouet, I came across the following thread: "So, what do remote field equations look like? And how do we solve them?" . Trivial question, but first answers didn't enlighten me about the basic understanding that i had already, but the main principle was still a bit obscure for me. But Ferris then posted a link to an article by John C. Hart, "Sphere tracing: a geometric method for the antialiased ray tracing of implicit surfaces" in 1996 and iq referred to two articles, a first even older John C. Hart, "Ray Tracing Deterministic 3-D Fractals" dating from 1989 and a resumption of the principle in the "Chapter 8. Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping with Distance Functions "of the book GPU from NVidia-Gems2 dating from 2004. Browsing the original article by John C. Hart, everything became clear! This article is an attempt to restore you some of the basic principle of RayMarching + DistanceFields, or more explicitly called Sphere Tracing.