iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Crazy that everyone is so hyped about a top-down urban driving game.

Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

How do you know that I’m a graphics programmer deep down in my heart? … Stopping in front of the fridge to admire these beautiful light patterns caused by the evening sun shining through tree canopy.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

I went star gazing in a dark-sky area for the first time in decades and it was amazing, but man there are so many satellites these days. It’s almost unbelievable! As a bonus enjoy this photo of Jupiter I took with my phone. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

After all of these years hearing about and talking about Amdahl's law, I actually I had no idea what Gene Amdahl actually looked like until today. 🤷

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

The RAM-price induced GPU shortage has led some folks to switch to alternatives…

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

The normal maps look sharp tonight.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Over the past two months, I’ve been diving into the Essence morph tech we built for Keeper - how we got here, how it works and some neat-looking results. I’m really proud of this system (and the game in general), and I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about it. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

The morph of the week is the "nightmare bridge". Nick did the initial pass and I tweaked the morph to make it more weird and "tentacely". This whole sequence is one of my favorites in the game.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

One aspect of Keeper's morph tech I'm fairly proud of is the fact that I wrote more than 50 pages of documentation and recorded about an hour of tutorial videos for this system.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

You can make things really weird by stacking a symmetry or twist operator on top of the fractal warp.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

As I mentioned before the Mandelbulb alien in Annihilation was a big inspiration, so now you know where that inspiration went. :) bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

This will be me Fractal Con! bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

My absolute favorite (and hands-down the most used) spatial warp in Keeper is the fractal. Our morph tech supports both Mandelbulb and Quaternion fractals. It's addictively cool and I could play with this all day long. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

The morph of the week is this little peek-a-boo window. I love the fractal warp used for the tell and as always VFX made this look 1000 times better with the additional elements like the bugs.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Spatial warps can be stacked in Keepers morph tech, but of course the order matters. For example applying the symmetry operator to something that is twisted looks quite different than twisting an object that was first warped by symmetry.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

By now it should be obvious that I'm a big fan of implicit surface representations. At the extreme, they let you tear objects apart and turn them inside out. While we didn't use these (stamp and repeat) warp types in Keeper it was straightforward and fun to prototype them.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Spatial warps are fun because you can get break the expectation of how an object might move, for example combining a simple melt deformation with a pull operator and animated warp centers.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Just in case ever you wanted to see all (remastered) animation frames from Day of the Tentacle scaled down on a single image.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Time for the morph-of-the-week. Nick modelled the source meshes and I set up the scene-graph and the basic sequence. Lee refined it and gave it the final touches.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Facebook reminded me that I watched the Holiday Special 10 years ago... I'll have to wait at least another 10 years before I can do that again. :P

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Spatial warps remap the positions used to sample an object’s distance field – effectively bending the space around the object. This illustration shows that process in action using a twist operation.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

One of my favorite ways to utilize the twist warp is to align it with the cross-fade frontier. This way the shape blend happens in the coiled up region, which looks super neat. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Thanks. Yeah the trick is to modify the WS position prior to sampling and my implementation is definitely inspired by Inigo Quilez' excellent write-up about distance fields... in this case the "Displacement" section. iquilezles.org/articles/dis...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Spatial warps are the real "magic sauce" of Keeper's morph tech. Since we use an implicit surface representation we can easily bend and distort space before the distance fields are sampled. This example is a showcase for the twist warp... Left: along-axis. Right: distance-from-center.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

One thing I didn’t cover in the video is how we handle emissive glow. Instead of using a third cubemap (and increasing GPU bandwidth), we used color segmentation: the user picks which part of the base color should glow. It’s surprisingly effective and very cheap. bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

If you are curious how the morphs were made in Keeper, then you can watch me create this "monkey-bunny" from scratch utilizing the tech I developed for the game. Enjoy and let me know what you think. :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9V_...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

I'm finalizing a video in which I create a morph from scratch and it looks like one needs a over-the-top pose for the "key-art" to grab attention. :P Which one should I use?

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Todd Vaziri's great Vanity Fair piece reminded me of the Owlbear morphs in DnD Honour Among Thieves. Due to the non-interactive nature of the medium there are lot more tricks one can use. Super cool stuff.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Additionally Annihilation also features a lighthouse... without legs though, so we win on that front in terms of weirdness.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Given what I've shown so far it won't come as a big surprise that Annihilation was a huge inspiration for our morph tech. This movie captures how truly weird alien life could be... and weird is what we wanted to achieve in Keeper. bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Here is another fun example of what one could do with the symmetry operator. On a related note... I do love my job! :) bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

The symmetry operator is one of my favorite effects in the Keeper morph tech. It is so much fun to play around with since it creates absolutely stunning visual pandemonium like this one.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

The morph-of-the-week is the awesome "gear door", which was inspired by the "hands door" I talked about. With Lee's concept Nick modelled and animated this morph. I love the fact that gears temporarily appear while the passageway is revealed. The spinning ones are additive. bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

We need more "hand doors" in games like this one from the movie Return to Oz.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

A major inspiration for the morphs in Keeper is the Nome king and his creatures from the movie "Return to Oz" (1985), which Jeremy brought to our attention. Rock surfaces change shape in unexpected ways and stuff appears / merges with the environment thanks to the wonderful stop motion animation.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

With the rising platform we recognized, that the morph tech isn't good at growing branches organically. Much later in the project Danielle used Houdini to make these awesome growing vines for the glyphs. Unfortunately we never got the chance to combine these with a morph. bsky.app/profile/p1xe...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

This Morph-of-the-Week is the growable platform - one of our earliest production morphs. Starting with the awesome concept by @leepetty.bsky.social the states were modelled by Nick. Once captured I set up the scene-graph and animated the morph. @lanethan.bsky.social added the cool foliage and fruit.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

The surflets actually flow nicely. :) For the distance field morphs it doesn't quite work like that. I spent quite some time pondering solutions but it didn't yield in anything useable. Essentially you would need to author a in-between shape that you then use to transition from state A to B.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

In the Fall of 2021 - long before "AI" lost its soul - I did some experiments with early generative image models. Running a recording of myself looking around the room through VQGAN yielded in a wonderfully bizarre mess.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I realized early on that a spatially constant cross-fade is nice, but for maximum expressiveness, spatial variance is required. We’ve added support for different transitions as a component that’s parented to the associated operation’s scene-tree node. You can even use a two-point Bézier spline...

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Most morphs in the game have a fairly simple scene-tree (like in the illustration), but it can get quite complicated. A perfect example is last weeks morph-of-the-week: the bridge.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Keeper's morphs are authored as scene-graph or more specifically as a scene-tree, which is evaluated bottom-up. I wrote a “compiler” which turns the tree into a command list which can be executed on the GPU. The compiler does a fair amount of optimization (e.g. dead branch pruning) to minimize cost.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

The size of the morph proxy mesh is a major factor when it comes to shading cost. If the shape of a morphed object changes dramatically then a conservative proxy wastes GPU cycles. We therefore implemented an implicit selection method which picks the best proxy based on the state of the scene-graph.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

To reduce the number of ray-marching steps needed to find the surface of our morphs we generate a proxy from the constituent meshes. It must fully enclose the morphed surfaces while remaining as tight as possible to maximize throughput. We want to minimize the red and blue regions in the debug view.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Here is a early prototype of this bridge. Not quite as expressive as the final version, but still looks quite neat.

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

We shipped Lucidity (in 2009) using XNA and writing the engine and toolset in C# was such a pleasure. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

I ported Broken Age and the adventure remasters to the PS Vita and man look at how huge the SteamDeck is compared to the Vita. :o

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Here is a close-up (and partial slow-down) of one of my favorite morphs in the game: the bridge in the Mountain Shrine. When I first got the rock to look like flowing water at the end I was elated. :)

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Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I’ve talked about how Keeper’s morphs use distance fields (DFs) as their surface representation. But if there are no polys, how do we render them? A DF gives the distance to the nearest surface at any point, which we can exploit for rendering by marching along the view ray until we hit the surface.

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