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mmalex blog 2025
I thought I'd start jotting down notes on my hobby projects here. Inspired by this post, I've decided to try to stay as un-stuck, aka 'slippy' as possible, and just post things, no matter how messy, small, incomplete, or inconsequential they may be. I have no idea if it will help me or anyone else, but it's worth a try.
If you want to comment, try @mmalex.bsky.social or @mmalex on x. I frequent the #techy-talk channel on the plinky discord, and post more visual plinky news on instagram as @plinkysynth.
It's been a while since I've done any hobby graphics programming; however I recently re-watched the brilliant 'Absolute Territory' by 'Prismbeings' aka Noby.
The thing is with me and shadertoy is that I love to just sketch out an idea, and I have noticed that I often repeat the same patterns.
This isnt a bad thing! I've come to think of it as a sort of 'personal style' - I love noise, I love softness, I love fog, scattering. My old motto at siggraph was for years, 'blur and add noise' and it seems I will never escape that.
however blurring in shadertoy is a bit of a faff (ok not much, but more than 0) so I thought - what if I jitter the pixel by a sharp, long tailed distribution?
The cauchy distribution is the right vibe here; gaussian is too fat in the middle, giving soggy blurry look. Cauchy - which is basically, a disc sample where the random radii follow tan(Z*pi/2) rather than the usual sqrt(Z) - means that most points end up near their proper place, but a few get thrown out - potentially all the way to infinity. (think of tan shooting up to its vertical asymptote).
Beyond that one idea, I just borrowed liberally from Noby's original aeesthetic - Ryoji Ikeda, 4k edition, if you like. Sometimes when you're starting up again, it's helpful to 'borrow' from someone you really respect. And Noby is a master of minimalism.
It's easy to miss some of the smaller choices that he makes that make all the difference IMHO: a long lens / aka small FOV gives it a cinematic instead of gameish aesthetic; the complete lack of colour is a real vibe - I actually don't like when colour comes into the original demo. I tried adding a dash, and it hurt the look. so I stayed b&w.
I changed the lighting a bit, and the shader ended up departing a bit from the original - but I was having fun!
The code is very simple - unidirectional path tracer, diffuse only - well, nearly only - a bit of fresnel on the sphere. and some mirrors. That's it! have a look.
I really enjoyed this, and hope to do more. Obvious alex-ish things to add would be fog, perhaps some caustics... who knows. Fun for the fuuture.
Using the same cauchy trick to do the bloom around an 'analog' style scope.
Just a quick sketch. Visit the shadertoy version for a variation with a vector scope.
plinky plus is a new version of plinky - same software, but a total physical remake.
it's the product of some incredibly hard and detailed work by makingsoundmachines. They created new manuals, a new physical design (spaced like piano keys - double the play surface), with balanced audio outs, all the features of the expander, a dust cover... and just a load of care and love. it's the best plinky ever. amazing work from roland and enrica.
meska, grain blanc and several other brilliant musicians are also working on preset packs that will be compatible with the original plinky as well. as ever, go over to plinkysynth.com for the latest, or join the plinky discord for chat!