Arctic Robots - Friday Afternoon 8k intro
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On Friday the 6th of February 2026, Kusma, Susencrusen and Lug00ber arranged an evening at Hackeriet in Oslo for introducing shader programming for
anyone interested in shaders and the demo scene.

This intro was started in the afternoon at about 5 o'clock and was shown to those who where present at about 10 o'clock in the evening.
The following Saturday morning I finished it up, adding some polish, better timing, greetings and some changes to the last two scenes.

Total dev time about 10 hours (not including the pipeline development of course).

The intro is lacking any original content or effects, and it's quite repetitive, but I'm quite pleased to have finished it in (for me) a very short timeframe.

The pipeline builds on the ray marching 4k-pipeline I used for the Mirrors 4k-intro (https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105481), but without transmission support, and
only two reflection bounces. I've extended the pipeline to support a custom frame buffer (instead of the default one) with SRGA-render textures and multiple render
targets (the latter was not used in this intro). I've also added support for multiple post processing passes, which is used in this intro to support the 
Kaleidoscope-effect and FXAA (in addition to the Gaussian Blur and Bloom effect).

The demo uses my favorite noise algorithm to generate the patterns on the walls, and the same noise is used for the camera shake.

For the font it's just Tahoma, but I've added some sinus based stretching in both x and y directions to make it a bit more interesting, and I'm happy with
coming up with that trick, as it looks far more "scene"-like than the plain standard font, without having to include a font.

For the first half of the demo the scene is set inside a box (rendered as a hollow sdf using abs(dist)-0.001), and having the first box transition intro the
four boxes using mix() to morph from the first shape to the multi-box shape, making a transition effect I quite liked. Simple but effective.

The last half of the intro is simply three blobs that morphs from spheres to boxes and back, and are "blobbified" using smooth minimum (from IQ), and some triangles
that "emit" some glow. I still haven't mastered the glow properly and often end up with horrible color banding, so still searching for better understanding on this issue :-)
The triangles simulates a tunnel effect simply by repeating the triangles in the z-direction using pTri.z = mod(pTri.z+time, 15)-7.5 effectively creating endless forward 
movement, and then adding a subtle rotation based on the z-pos of the world (pTri *= rotZ(pos.z * 0.1)). The one triangle in the first tunnel is "triplicated" using
a polar operation in the last sequence. The blobs are also ran through two polar operations one in the xy and one in the xz axis, making the horrible finale "flow effect".

The music was created a few days earlier using Cubase and the Sointu-synth, and only I spent about 5 hours on it. The music is very repetitive and probably off-key, 
but then again I'm not a musician, and I'm so sorry to those of you who are for inflicting this on you :-D

-Zeko
