Paul Malin

YouTube video by Ancient Digital Iris

"Animated Bokeh" has been on my whiteboard for a long time, and this is the result.

I thought it would just be for cheesy novelty effects, but it also does lightfield manipulation that was cooler than I expected.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2...

Conversation with Claude about tracery parsers, and it advises me to look at kate comptons parser, to which i reply “but Doctor i am kate compton”

Doctor says, 'Dont worry, parser design is simple. Great programmer Kate Compton has written the parser you seek’

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a robot army is a good guy with a robot army.

It makes me want to code something with 3DFX Glide.

Here's a small treat if you're looking for some colorful backgrounds: 8k screenshots of our 2024 64k intro Empires with particle counts cranked to the tens of millions.
As a bonus there are also a bunch of ultrawides in there for multi-monitor setups. conspiracy.hu/files/screen...

I finally found the time and energy to make a new blog and write a couple of posts. This time I wrote about PBR content and game development principles. Both posts are quite different so hopefully people find something interesting on either one of them.

irradiance.ca/posts/

🎵 Win or lose, sink or swim
One thing is certain, we'll never give in
Side by side, hand in hand
We all stand together 🎵

🎵 Win or lose, sink or swim
One thing is certain, we'll never give in
Side by side, hand in hand
We all stand together 🎵

Destroy him my robots.

Don't forget the humble BBC Micro port by yours truly, with music by @inversephase.bsky.social! Find out more and download here: bitshifters.github.io/posts/prods/...

Done a little cry to this.

If everyone complaining about immigrants could just take a moment to understand how so many of them feel there wouldn't be all this hate.

Most of the slides and course notes for the SIGGRAPH 2025 Physically Based Shading in Theory and practice course are now online, with more to follow:
blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

Photo of a path through trees in a wood. Sat in the middle of the path if you zoom in is a sitting cat looking at the camera.

Zoom in for bonus cat.

Aha.
For some reason I'm also glad to learn "The mould was known as a flong."

Oh nice one. I like all your tiny shaders but this one is really neat.

Hey, you sass that hoopy Tom Forsyth? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.

🎵 Darning his socks which he keeps in a jar by the door.
Who could want more?
All the lovely people... 🎵

and this one ended up with the most over the top beer and glass rendering for what ends up just a few pixels high.

This was one of the last ones to be made. Really happy how well it turned out though considering how simple the astronaut model and lighting actually is.

This was supposed to be like a "leaning tower of Pisa" pose but I'm not sure how well that came across. The sky is nice though.

So I'm spamming them here :D

I tweaked the program I was using to preview the animations to make some .gif files of the different sections.

I put an early version of the astronaut model in some of the shots and joked "hah, they look like selfies" and we ended up going with that theme.

@kieranhj.bsky.social wanted some "simple" UV lookup table effects for the part of the demo that he was coding. We came up with a scheme that allowed some shading and so I just had to add nice lighting and reflections and a bunch of advanced features. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

The other production I had a hand in at Nova 2025 was the Allstar Megademo for the Acorn Archimedes.
www.pouet.net/prod.php?whi...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_cY...
For which I made all the graphics and lookup table effects for the "Space Trip" section in #shadertoy.

A digital rendering of a black hole, with a glowing accretion disk and background stars distorted by gravitational lensing. The black hole appears as a dark sphere at the centre, surrounded by a luminous, elliptical ring of bright matter. The scene is reminiscent of visualizations from the film Interstellar. In the bottom right corner is the stylized logo "Nova," indicating the party it was released at.

Last weekend was the Nova 2025 demoparty in the UK. I worked on a couple of the productions released there.
I made a 4Kb Executable Graphics picture "void main".
www.pouet.net/prod.php?whi...
Since then I've also put a variation of the code up on #shadertoy www.shadertoy.com/view/3fySDR

Ouch.
When we worked with them the phrase "Where there's blame there's Acclaim" floated round our office.

Hi, I'm Paul, a tech programmer in the games industry.
I'm a Technical Director at Assemble Technology in the UK working with a number of studios.

I've been known to make stuff on #shadertoy, do random coding for old machines and some other #demoscene stuff.

Expect terrible puns and daft nonsense.

vertexshaderart - Garden Fireworks - by P_Malin vertexshadertart

Love this!
Reminds me of this silly thing I made a while ago www.vertexshaderart.com/art/TdqvseMQ...

For the love of our eyeballs, do not align your ember particles to velocity!

Don’t give them that comet texture either, ugh.

Let’s make
✨physically based flying embers✨

A Unity vfx graph implementation and explanation below. 🧵