Plasma Effect (2016)
4rknova.com60 points by todsacerdoti 3 days ago
60 points by todsacerdoti 3 days ago
As someone who has seen this effect before, but was unclear how it was done, this article is very "and now draw the rest of the owl". They define a basic equation, it's about what I expected, but the end shader code doesn't use it in that form, and I found it pretty difficult to parse, I can't say I'm much better off in the end.
What I usually do in 2026 is copy the code and article and have Claude clarify the unclear parts for me. then is ok.
But that's sort of the author's job: if they wish to publish an article on a topic, they should make it both comprehensive and comprehensible.
Love seeing plasma explained again. It’s wild how a few sines and cosines can still look this organic decades later. Feels very demoscene-pure: simple math, clever color mapping, and suddenly you’ve got motion and depth. Also cool to see specular highlights layered on top, old tricks, modern hardware.
All I hear is the music from Second Reality (the plasma cube part).
Someone did a complete rewrite of it in js - https://covalichou.github.io/second-reality-js/
Loved the intro but that code sample could've used proper variable names.
Would have been awesome if there was step by step visualization where simple color transforms slowly upgraded until you get final result for easier understanding of what each thing is doing.
Otherwise quite hard to visualize changes in you head.
Plasma-Pong was a great game
Specular is a cool addition!