Ray KilnOne shader, every week.
Ray Kiln publishes one new Metal shader a week. A short video shows how it is built; a page here has the full source, every parameter explained, and the sound it makes.
The name comes from light and from firing: “ray” for raymarching and the way light travels, “kiln” for something made fresh and hot every week.
What a shader is
A shader is a small program that runs on the graphics chip. A fragment shader runs once for every pixel, many millions of times a frame, and returns that pixel's colour. With nothing but a formula you can make clouds, fire, water or a scene in 3D. Metal is Apple's language for it.
One file makes the picture and the sound
Each episode is a single .metal file. A function called shade returns the colour of every pixel. A second, sound, returns the stereo audio sample for any moment in time, and runs on the graphics chip too. The picture and the soundtrack come from the same timeline, so they always agree.
How the videos are made
A small Mac app runs the shader and records it frame by frame at a fixed timestep, so even a heavy shader gives a perfectly smooth 4K, 60 frames a second capture. The sliders you see on screen are declared in the shader with one comment line each, and the same lines make the parameters table on each page.
Open source
The shaders, the Mac app that runs them and the code that builds this site are all in one public repository, under the MIT license: github.com/pablinme/RayKiln. The Ray Kiln name and artwork are the exception; the license file says which.
Who
Made by Pablo Miranda.