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Rgba

The Spanish group behind Elevated and the first Shadertoy

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A Spanish PC demo group active from 2001 to 2009. It won competitions at Spanish parties with demos and 64K intros, then made its name with iq's 4K intros and images, from Kindernoiser to Ixaleno, and with Elevated, made with TBC, which won the PC 4K intro competition at Breakpoint 2009. Shadertoy began as an rgba tool in 2009.

At Breakpoint 2008, in Bingen am Rhein, a single still picture won the executable 4K graphics competition with 1,154 points. The runner-up scored 823. The picture was Ixaleno, a mountain landscape that a 4,096-byte program calculated from scratch each time it ran. It was signed by rgba, a demo group from Spain, and made by its member iq, Íñigo Quílez. People kept asking Quílez, he wrote later, when such imagery would run in real time. A year later rgba and the Danish group TBC answered with Elevated, which won the PC 4K intro competition at Breakpoint 2009.

Fast facts

  • From: Spain.
  • Active: 2001 to 2009, in the group’s own words.
  • Platform: PC (Windows and Linux), plus one demo for the PlayStation Portable.
  • Best known for: Elevated (2009, with TBC) and iq’s 4K intros and images.
  • Members: fifteen, listed on the group’s website, including iq (Íñigo Quílez), Enlar (Eneko Lacunza), Utopian (Francisco J. Peña), Epsilum (Luís Osendi), R3D (Borja Morales) and Jober (Joseba Beristain).

Spanish parties

rgba grew up at Spain’s own parties. Its earliest productions, in 2001, were an invitation to Durango Party 2 and a 4K intro, Julia Slide, made with the group Glue. The group built its own tools: a demo engine called Epopeia, a texture manager and a 3D engine, with the effects written as plugins. Many of its demos were released for both Windows and Linux.

The prizes followed. According to Demozoo’s records, Paradise Is Coming won the 64K intro competition at BCN Party in Barcelona in 2002, and the demo R.E.D. won the demo competition there in 2003. At Euskal Encounter 12, in the Basque Country, in 2004, Paradise won the open intro competition with 225 points, ahead of Concept and Polygon’s ::crv on 180. Quílez described it as a 64 KB program with “realtime rendering, shaders, sound synthesis, mesh compression, catmul-clark subdivision, and procedural modeling, texturing and animation”. XenomorphiC won the demo competition at Ifparty 2005 in Valencia, and in November 2005 rgba, Gum and Network won BCN Party’s handheld competition with DeadPixel Controversy on the PlayStation Portable.

Four kilobytes

From 2006 most of rgba’s releases were 4K intros and 4K images by Quílez, each a Windows program no bigger than 4,096 bytes that builds its pictures and music as it runs. His own list of them reads like a set of experiments, one technique each:

  • Kinderpainter (2006) ray-traced “a few conic sections” on the graphics card and played his own music. It won at BCN Party 2006.
  • Kinderplomber (2007) rendered a compressed mesh with dynamic radiosity lighting. It came fourth at Breakpoint 2007, with 696 points.
  • Stiletto (2007) animated a walking figure, with automatic skinning, mesh compression and a procedural walk cycle. It came second in the 4K intro competition at Assembly 2007, with 4,055 points to the winner’s 9,218.
  • Kindernoiser (2007) ray-marched a Julia set fractal on the graphics card. It won at BCN Party 2007.
  • Ixaleno (2008), the still landscape, won at Breakpoint 2008.

Ray marching was the technique that caught on. Instead of drawing triangles, the program steps a ray out from the camera for every pixel until it reaches a surface described by a formula, a signed distance field. In 2005 Quílez had made 4 Verts, a 4K that did all its drawing in GLSL fragment shaders on just two triangles covering the screen, and he later called it “the beginning of what would become Shadertoy four years later”. He explained the approach to other coders in a talk, “Rendering worlds with two triangles”, at the nVision conference in San Jose in 2008. By the following spring, he told the Function party, “everybody could smell it was going to be the year of the raymarching”, and several of the 4K intros at Breakpoint 2009 used it. Elevated, which beat them, mostly did not: its mountains were a mesh of triangles, with ray-marching-style lighting and texturing applied afterwards to every pixel.

After the group

Demozoo credits a Windows tool called Shadertoy to rgba in December 2009, and a function-graphing tool, Graph Toy, in 2010. By then Quílez had left Europe: his résumé records him at Pixar from 2009 to 2014, where he built its system for procedural terrain and vegetation, used on films from Brave to Coco. With Pol Jeremias he turned Shadertoy into a website, shadertoy.com, which was online by February 2013. Its about page described Shadertoy as the first application to let developers “push pixels from code to screen using WebGL since 2009”. In 2022 Quílez and Jeremias received the ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award for their work on it.

The group itself ended in 2009. In July 2019 it published the source code of its whole demo system on GitHub under the MIT licence: Epopeia, the texture manager, the 3D engine “Fantasy” and the plugins used in its productions, credited to Enlar, Utopian, Epsilum, iq and R3D, with a second repository holding the binaries of its productions.

Sources

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