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runevisionon Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter

The blog post and the companion video (and shader source code) explain an erosion technique which emulates gorgeous branching gullies and ridges without simulation, while still allowing every point to be evaluated in isolation, which means it’s fast, GPU-friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks.

runevisionon [dead]

I'd like to expand with some more details and developments since the post I saw here a few weeks ago about my Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique. (That post (not by me) was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808889)

I've since made it work also in color (RGB dithering and CMYK halftone) and demonstrated what it looks like in true 1-bit (or 3-bit for color) at low resolutions as well. See the linked demonstration video for a variety of styles/aesthetics it can be used for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzjWBmhO_1E

The original explainer video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs

And the repository is here: https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D

Lots of people both here and elsewhere has speculated about various alterations or different use cases, etc. I'd like to point to this FAQ that have a lot of common topics covered. If you have questions, suggestions or similar, it would be a good idea to check that out first (after the explainer video): https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D/discussions/12

Furthermore, lots of people have been inspired to make their own implementations, or related effects inspired by Surface Stable Fractal Dithering. I keeping a list of the ones I know about here: https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D/discussions/14

For example, Aras Pranckevičius got a simplified version of the effect to work on Playdate. Since the Playdate does not have a GPU, the effect (along with 3D rasterization in general) is implemented fully CPU-based here. https://aras-p.info/blog/2025/02/09/Surface-Stable-Fractal-D...

Ryan / InfernalWAVE is working on an implementation for Godot: https://x.com/InfernalWAVE_/status/1888718257122668705

arColm made shaders for MineCraft: https://bsky.app/profile/arcolm.bsky.social/post/3lhdjbrhzis...

I've been surprised and happy that the effect has gotten as much interest as it has, and I'm hoping we'll eventually see games released that use this technique.