Giuseppe Recupero, who works as Jae, builds shaders directly in the browser with WebGL, concentrating on dispersion, absorption and subsurface scattering — the optical effects that are expensive to fake convincingly and immediately obvious when faked badly.
His current experiment does something structurally odd: a cloth simulation controls the surface of a refractive material. A ray-marched cube, real-time refraction, chromatic dispersion, and a 2D simulation driving the geometry of a 3D optical solid. The honest description is the one 80 Level reached for — it looks like jelly made of glass. Hover and drag to deform it; it responds live. He has since added soft-body physics to the glass pieces, so dots inside a spinning die move and then settle.
Why the combination is interesting rather than just pretty
Refraction and cloth are usually solved in different parts of the pipeline, and for good reason.
Refraction wants a known surface. Whether you ray-march a signed distance field or trace against a mesh, you need the normal at the hit point to bend the ray, and you need it to be stable. Dispersion makes this worse: you are effectively tracing the same ray three times at different indices to split the colour, so any noise in the normal becomes visible fringing.
Cloth wants to be unstable. A cloth solver is a mass-spring or position-based system whose entire character comes from the fact that it moves unpredictably, folds against itself, and does not settle to a smooth analytic surface.
Putting the second in charge of the first is asking for a surface whose normals jitter in exactly the way refraction punishes. That it reads as a coherent material rather than a mess of artefacts is the technical content of the piece — and it is also the reason the result does not look like anything in a standard renderer’s library. Glass does this nowhere in nature, and no shader preset gets you here.
The other thing to notice: this is the 2D/3D boundary used deliberately rather than hidden. Most browser graphics work in one register or the other. A flat simulation driving a volumetric optical effect is a specific aesthetic choice, and it gives the result its particular wrongness.
FragCoord, and why a second shader platform matters
Jae shares his experiments on FragCoord, a shader-sharing platform created by XorDev as an alternative to Shadertoy.
Shadertoy has been the field’s commons for over a decade, and its effect on the craft is hard to overstate — a public, forkable corpus of GLSL where the whole point is that you can read the source of anything that impresses you. The risk of a single commons is the obvious one: everyone’s reference, everyone’s conventions, one set of defaults, one maintainer’s priorities.
A second platform is healthy for the same reason a second implementation of anything is healthy. It is worth watching what diverges — whether FragCoord develops different norms around what a shader is for.
XorDev has opened more than seventy tutorials
Separately and more immediately useful: XorDev has made over 70 of his shader tutorials available to everyone.
The framing matters. These are described as deep dives rather than step-by-step lessons — they explain the mathematics and the techniques, covering noise, ray marching, fractals and more, and he has also published ready-to-use shaders, including ones for glass effects.
That distinction is the whole value. The shader-tutorial genre skews heavily toward “type this and get a result,” which produces a working effect and no transferable understanding. You end up with a copy of someone’s glass shader and no ability to make it do something it does not already do. Material that explains why the dispersion loop is structured the way it is leaves you able to write the next one yourself.
Seventy of those, free, from someone whose own work is the demonstration, is a substantial addition to the available teaching material in a field where the good explanations have historically been scattered across forum posts and tweets.
Elsewhere in the same vein
80 Level flags two more worth a look: mesq’s jiggly jelly dessert and ScottieFox’s water caustics — both in the same territory of optical effects running live in a browser.