I’ve been working on some things recently, so haven’t really been writing anything for the blog, so I want to try to do what I said this blog is for and express incomplete thoughts/progress updates. So I’m going to try to come here every week to let you all know what I’m up to. So…
What Have I been working on this week?
Shaders
So this week, I’ve been working on some shaders. If you don’t know, a shader is a program that runs on your computer’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that sets the colors of the pixels on your screen. Shaders are a fundamental part of the graphics processing pipeline that you unknowingly interact with on a daily basis in games, movies, and anything related to computer animation. Chances are, if you can see it on your screen, a shader put it there.
I’ve been playing around with shaders for a long time, but never really felt confident with expressing myself artistically with them. I’m trying to break out of the cycle of letting the code I write and the projects I make sit on my harddrive to rot (cosmic rays be damned), I’ve made a little site both to showcase shaders I’m working on and also to serve as a responsive workspace for shaders I’m working on.
I am aware that shadertoy exists and I will be using some of the work on there as inspiration, but I like getting the practice of building websites either way to get more experience with React and just with building and releasing projects that have been in my head for a long time.
All that being said, here are some of my Cool Shaders. Enjoy!
One of my cool shaders 😄
If you’re interested, here are some of the resources that I’ve found useful in learning about shaders and computer graphics at large, as well as some tools for working with shaders.
Learning resources
- https://learnopengl.com/ - A great resource for learning about shaders and using open GL with C/C++ by Joey de Vries
- https://webglfundamentals.org/ - Excellent resource for learning about webgl and computer graphics on the web
- https://iquilezles.org/ - Blog of the singular Inigo Quilez, legendary modern graphics wizard who has graciously shared his many years of expertise
Tools
- https://dev.thi.ng/gradients/ - A resource for creating procedural colour palettes
- https://www.shadertoy.com/ - A site for sharing fragment shaders by Inigo Quilez
- https://www.graphtoy.com/ - A site for experimenting with glsl functions, once again by Inigo Quilez
Libaries
- twgl - low level library for learning about and working with webgl
- threejs - very popular, performant and well-supported 3d graphics library
- react-three-fiber - library that makes working with threejs in React much easier