Fun fact: the Marathon spinner is actually a hand-coded shader! It has to display before the engine loads any textures or videos, so it's entirely procedurally animated and rendered by a shader I wrote for it using SDFs, procedural noise, and a pile of math for the animation :)

Most of the work I did at Bungie was behind the scenes on the engine, vfx tech, and artist/designer-facing tools, so it was awesome getting to put on my tech art hat and build something more visible :) (fantastic concept + art direction by Wolfie Davis!)

I love the spinner!!! I've been making them on plastic canvas :)

Whoaaah I love these!

This is one of my favorite things about the whole loading sequence of Marathon! I'm unfamiliar with the kind of math that goes into animations. Could you throw out an example or something that maybe explains what's going on behind the scenes?

Sure! In simple terms, there's 3 parts: - the shapes are drawn using 2D SDFs - I blend a few colors for the "pixels" turning on and off - for each "pixel", I use its position, the moth shape, the current time, and some noise to decide when to turn it on and off

I highly recommend The Book of Shaders to learn more about this type of math - their chapters on shape rendering ( and noise ( are excellent. I'm also personally inspired by @iquilezles's work in this area (

@iquilezles (I should clarify: the designs of each moth and stage are all Wolfie's! I encoded them as the bits in a few integers in the shader. The SDFs are used for the shape of each "pixel", along with the registration marks, anti-aliasing calculations, etc)

I was so enamored with it I tried my best in scaling it down and then reshaping it to make a pixel'd version a while back. Such creative design in a relatively low form factor!

Ahhhh I love your work! I tried to remake it in canvas when we first saw it!

Peak...

I fucking love that thing. Nice work! My brother wants to know if the other photography and random stuff for loading screens was done in house.

@artofallan i love math

Love this loader! The game gets a ton of unwarranted hate for no reason imo - I think the UI is awesome / fits the vibe.

@bumgieofficial gonna pretend to know what you just said but that’s so fkn cool 😂😭

Noob graphics dev here, teach me your secrets, grand wizard 😭🙏

Replied here with some info on this type of thing :)

Ooooo Grand wizard, thank you for bestowing this knowledge upon me 😭🙏

Your loading anim is the coolest one i've ever seen, very happy to finally see who made it. Always wished my loading would be slower so I get to see it as many times as possible. Are you allowed to let me know if there's any way I could extract it so I can use it on DIY projects?

Every time I see something from Bungie devs it’s just cool.

you single handedly made the game super interesting for so many people just because of this, what a legend

Oyy!

@bumgieofficial Thats so fucking sick! Its stuff like this that makes me want to see the code for it so bad. Still learning and all that

ahhhhhh that’s so cool what the hell

this is nerdy af!! what the helll!!!!

holy shitttt

@kambyyy so obsessed with this

So fucking cool, you’re so clever, i always loved how it would change to different shapes and thought it was scripted. The fact it isn’t just compliments the effort you put into it. Thank you

Awesome

the small jitter when the squares transition on the wipe aniamtion is just chefs kiss

@artofallan I love staring at this when playing

@COSMICraven117 Hell to the yes. I’ve been really getting into shaders lately and I’m just totally amazed at how much can be accomplished with little bits of math flowing into other bits of math!

@Q2726054234 I always wondered why it looks like a daphnia in one of the forms!

nothing should hire you

@bumgieofficial I love it what was backstory behind if you don’t mind saying?

That is Very Cool

Any time I saw this when playing I was wondering how they made it - one of my fav parts of the game lol

The sub pixels are very satisfying and I think its really cool that you thought of that to add more motion to the limited cel count.

Beautiful.

@artofallan it's my favorite detail. or one of them. there's so many