1 - Introduction

Join me on a shader journey through Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe's Book of Shaders.

Chapter 1 - The Book of Shaders

Chapter 1 of the Book of Shaders explains what shaders are. I've distilled some of this information into a blog post but I'll repeat some of it here.

What Are Shaders?

Shaders are instructions for constructing images on a computer.

Shaders are written such that each pixel can be calculated indepently, meaning that video-card GPUs can parallelize the generation of each pixel. This makes shaders incredibly fast, even for complex generated scenes.

GLSL, the OpenGL Shader Language, is based on the C programming language.

A few OpenGL / WebGL / GLSL Resources:

Shader Challenge

I'm going to document my learning on this website as I work through each chapter in The Book of Shaders.

The challenge:

  • Write at least one well-commented GLSL shader per chapter.
  • Document my learning side-quests in math and colour theory.
  • Play around with recreating my GLSL shaders as Unreal Engine node-based Materials.

Chapters Complete So Far

So far I've worked my way through chapters 1 through 5:

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