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iq

Íñigo Quílez — 4K intros to Shadertoy

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iq (Íñigo Quílez) is a Spanish graphics programmer who learnt his craft making demos from 1998. With the group Rgba he made 4K intros and images that rendered whole scenes from formulas, co-created Elevated, then built procedural scenery at Pixar and, with Pol Jeremias, turned Shadertoy into a website.

In May 2008 Íñigo Quílez gave a talk called “Making graphics in 4 kilobytes” at Inspire, a demo event in Errenteria in the Basque Country. When he published the slides, one was missing. On the day he had shown a picture there, already finished but not yet entered in any competition. Two months later he entered it, as a 4,096-byte program, at Euskal Encounter, and it won. He named it Slisesix, from “SLIde SEventy SIX”, the slide where it should have been. The image was drawn by ray marching a signed distance field, a way of describing a whole scene as one mathematical function. Quílez, known in the demo scene as iq, went on to explain the technique in talks and tutorials, and later to build Shadertoy, a website where anyone can write such programs in a web browser.

Fast facts

  • Handle: iq.
  • From: Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain.
  • Group: Rgba, a Spanish demo group active from 2001 to 2009.
  • Best known for: Elevated (2009, with TBC); ray-marched 4K images such as Slisesix and Ixaleno; Shadertoy.
  • Later work: Pixar (2009–2014), Oculus and Facebook (2015–2019), Adobe (2022–2025).
  • Award: ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award, 2022, with Pol Jeremias, for Shadertoy.

Learning in the demo scene

Quílez studied electrical engineering at the University of the Basque Country. Graphics he learnt from demos. “Making these is how I learnt programing and computer graphics in my early years,” he writes on his list of about 60 productions, which starts with Nabla, a software-rendered MS-DOS demo that he calls his first project written in C. His 64K intro Fractal Chaos crashed halfway through on the big screen at Euskal Encounter in 1998, “in front of a couple thousand people”, and came last. The next year Rare won Euskal’s 64K intro competition.

He joined Rgba, and most of his prizes in the early 2000s were won at Spanish parties with 64K intros and 4K programs. His 2002 4K image Resplandor drew a terrain by ray marching “a signed noise field”, and he later said his work with such fields started around 2001, like that of “many other demosceners of that time”, mostly for fractals and metaballs. In 2005 he made 4 Verts, a 4K that did all its drawing in GLSL fragment shaders on two triangles covering the screen. He called it “the beginning of what would become Shadertoy four years later”.

Four kilobytes

From 2006 most of Quílez’s releases were 4K intros and 4K images, each a Windows program of at most 4,096 bytes. Each tried a different technique: ray tracing a few conic sections on the graphics card in Kinderpainter (2006), radiosity lighting in Kinderplomber (2007), a skinned, procedurally animated walking figure in Stiletto (2007) and a ray-marched Julia set fractal in Kindernoiser (2007). Several came with his own music, and his production list links to source code for several of them, among them Kinderpainter, Kinderplomber and Kindernoiser.

In 2007, he wrote later, he read work by Alex Evans and Keenan Crane and began constraining his signed fields to be true distances. The result was a run of 4K images in 2008. Ixaleno, a mountain landscape, won the executable graphics competition at Breakpoint in Germany, and Slisesix at Euskal Encounter and Organix at Function in Budapest won there. At the nVision event in San Jose that year he explained the method to other programmers in “Rendering worlds with two triangles”: distance fields to speed up ray marching, repeating objects across space, blending shapes smoothly, soft shadows and ambient occlusion. Distance fields had been “a dismissed if not forgotten field of Computer Graphics”, he wrote, and he likes to think the talk “somehow brought it to people’s attention”.

By Breakpoint 2009, he told the Function party that autumn, “everybody could smell it was going to be the year of the raymarching”. His own entry there was not a ray marcher. Elevated, made with Mentor and Puryx of the Danish group TBC, draws its mountains as a flat mesh of triangles pushed up and down by a vertex shader. A full-screen pass then textures and lights every pixel, and a further pass adds motion blur. His production list describes it as rendering “polygons with deferred texturing and lighting”. It won the PC 4K intro competition at Breakpoint 2009 and the Scene.org Award for best 4K intro of that year.

Pixar, Shadertoy and after

Quílez joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2009, after six years at VRcontext in Brussels rendering huge CAD models for virtual reality. At Pixar he built the procedural sets for the films. His résumé credits him with creating Wondermoss, Pixar’s system for procedural terrain, vegetation and foliage, “used from Brave to Coco”. On Brave he made the forest’s grass, moss, weeds, bushes, lichens and tree canopies, work that won a Visual Effects Society award in 2013 for the film’s forest environment.

Shadertoy began as a Windows tool credited to Rgba in December 2009. With Pol Jeremias, Quílez turned it into a website, shadertoy.com, which was online by February 2013. There anyone can write a fragment shader, the same kind of small program that drew 4 Verts, run it in a web browser and share it. Its about page described it 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 “decade long work on Shadertoy”.

After Pixar, Quílez moved to Oculus in 2015, first as a visual effects supervisor at Oculus Story Studio. There he created Quill, a tool for drawing and animating in virtual reality, and was its product manager at Oculus and Facebook until 2019. He co-created Memix, a video-conferencing plugin with shader-based filters, in 2020, and worked at Adobe as a principal research engineer from 2022 to 2025.

He still enters competitions. His 4K image Hoody, “a big mathematical formula” in which the objects are distance fields, won the 4K executable graphics competition at Revision in 2020 with 1,747 points. His website collects more than a hundred tutorials, among them his lists of distance functions for 2D and 3D shapes. He releases the code snippets under the MIT licence and asks that his shader art be licensed for other use.

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