> Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.

Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.

So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).

Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.

And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.

But I would not feel bad about the math being regurgiated by an LLM.

There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after.

So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years.

The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.

But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.