[olpyhn]

Mesh gradients are a powerful way to create smooth, organic color transitions. Traditional techniques like spline-based interpolation or multiple overlapping radial gradients can be effective—but they also come with trade-offs: visual artifacts, complexity, or the need for structured meshes.

In this article, I’ll show you how to use Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation to generate seamless gradients from just a set of colored points. This approach is portable, flexible, and simple to implement.

[smidgeon]

RBFs are splendid, but you don't need to have them "decay with distance", indeed, ones which don't (mutliquartics etc) often have better approximation properties and better-conditioned linear systems to solve, give them a go! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09557...

[olpyhn]

Interesting, will try it out. Thank you!

Tbh, I tried several different functions, but nothing worked better than inverse quadric function. Though, I'm not sure if I tried anything without decay

[smidgeon]

One interesting group is the compactly supported RBFs, for example those of Wendland https://math.iit.edu/~fass/603_ch4.pdf the advantage being that the resulting linear systems are sparse, useful when you have lots of points to interpolate and "gaps" is not an issue.