Скачать или смотреть Phoenix Ascending: 100% GLSL shader with embedded neural network and lattice gas fluid solver

You can achieve a lot with GLSL shaders, however sandboxes like Shadertoy offer an especially interesting challenge by restricting which assets can be loaded in at runtime. Importing custom content outside of Shadertoy's built-in library means embedding data directly into the source code without also blowing up loading and compilation times.

"Phoenix Ascending" blends physics and animation to render an ethereal bird hovering in the air and flinging lava and sparks in all directions. To achieve this effect, I trained a tiny neural network to encode an animated distance field of a hawk, then used it to seed particles into a lattice gas fluid simulation. The entire project fits into just a few kilobytes of GLSL spread over 4 render passes and I'm honestly really pleased with how it all turned out.

This video shows a step-by-step breakdown of the training, simulation and compositing process from start to finish. I recommend watching in 4K to avoid YouTube's potato-quality compression. If enough people are interested, I might make a longer video where I go into each stage of the process in greater detail.

Check out the project on Shadertoy here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WclSWl