Student Competition Call for Entries
Theme: Vast Proceduralism and Global Illumination
HPG 2026 invites students to participate in this year’s competition, challenging you to create a ShaderToy shader exploring vast procedural scenes with physically-based global illumination.
Challenge Overview
Procedural techniques enable the creation of large-scale, complex, and richly detailed virtual worlds without manual modeling. Coupled with global illumination (GI), these methods reveal realistic multi-bounce lighting, shadows, and color bleeding in intricate environments.
Your task
Implement a global illumination shader in ShaderToy that showcases:
- Vast procedural scenes
- Algorithmically generated, large or infinite in scale (fractals, SDFs, noise, neural fields, tiled or hybrid systems).
- Global Illumination
- support multiple bounces for indirect lighting and realistic light transport.
Requirements
- ShaderToy-based GLSL implementation
- Multiple buffers, textures, and inputs allowed.
- Procedural content
- Generate geometry and scene complexity at runtime
- GI
- Implement global illumination demonstrating indirect lighting.
- Visual complexity
- Scenes should extend beyond isolated objects &mash; think landscapes, fractals, volumetrics, or procedural cities.
- Performance
- eal-time is not required but shaders should be optimized for reasonable rendering times on ShaderToy. In particular, shaders should avoid unbounded loops or allocations that could cause instability. Entries should be testable on a single consumer GPU with approximately 8-12 GB of VRAM, a modern multi-core CPU, and standard ShaderToy execution limits.
Recommended Test Configuration
Authors are encouraged to test their submissions on:
- A standard desktop setup (A 4-8 core CPU, single consumer GPU with ~12 GB VRAM, and a current Chrome or Firefox browser).
- Submissions should remain stable and responsive within ShaderToy’s execution environment.
- Because ShaderToy runs in a browser environment, performance and behavior may vary depending on browser configuration, drivers, and GPU translation layers (e.g., ANGLE).
- To disable WebGL in Chrome using ANGLE, go to chrome://flags/ in the address bar, find the option to enable WebGL, and click “Disable.” After that, restart Chrome to apply the changes.
- To disable WebGL in Firefox, go to the address bar and type “about:config”. Then, search for “webgl.disabled” and ensure it is set to true; you can also set “webgl.force-enabled” to false if needed.
Evaluation Criteria
- Creativity and originality of procedural representation
- Quality and accuracy of global illumination
- Visual richness and scene complexity
- Code clarity and ShaderToy efficiency
- Alignment with the theme of vast proceduralism plus GI
Suggested Starting Points
- Procedural signed distance fields with instancing or repetition
- Fractal or recursive geometry with multi-bounce GI
- Sparse volumetric or neural implicit fields generated on the fly
- Layered procedural textures driving geometry
- Infinite or tiled worlds demonstrating scale
Eligibility
Anyone who was a student at the time the work was completed was welcome to participate.
Submission Details
- Submit your ShaderToy link plus a short description of your procedural approach and GI technique to studentcompetition@highperformancegraphics.org.
- Include performance notes, bounce count, and any creative features.
- Deadline (End of day, PDT)
- Friday, May 15, 2026
Final Notes
Push the boundaries of procedural generation and physically-based rendering within ShaderToy’s compact environment. Whether fractals or sprawling procedural cities, we look forward to seeing your creativity illuminate vast virtual worlds with realistic light transport.
Past winners
- 2025
-
- 1st Place
- Lucas Domingo Alber (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
- 2nd Place
- Hibiki Kirihata (Toyo University)
- 3rd Place
- Gustaf Waldemarson (Lund University)
- Honorable Mentions
- Rasmus Clausen
- Sparsh Nair
- Eva Kato
- 2024
-
- 1st Place
- Murilo Mesquita Carolina (Universidade Federal de Goiás)
- 2nd Place
- Wenjian Zhou (University of Utah)
- 2023
- Student competition cancelled
- 2022
-
- Winner
- Yu Chengzhong (Tokyo university of science)
- Honorable Mentions
- Akshay Jindal
- Arthur Pereira Vala Firmino
- 2021
-
- Winner
- Andrew Hollis & Ajinkya Gavane (North Carolina State University)
Efficient Ray-Tracing for Urban Radiation Source Localization - Finalist
- He (Anka) Chen (University of Utah)
MeshFrame: a Light Weighted Dynamic Mesh Processing Framework
- 2020
-
- Winner
- Evgeniya Malikova (Bournemouth University)
Ray-casting Inspired Visualization Pipeline for Multi-scale Heterogeneous Objects