The Book of Shaders - A gentle introduction to procedural effects and textures

[09:57 mon,22.June 2020 by Rudi Schmidts]

If you have asked yourself after our News about the 2D Motion Design Tool Cavalry, what procedural effects should actually be, you can help. Similar to generative textures, procedural effects are effects that primarily result from a concatenation of mathematical formulas and can usually be calculated in real time on a GPU.

So instead of applying a graphic or an effect to individual pixels, a formula is sought instead that produces the desired result for each pixel in the image. Since such generative textures are often used in computer games (among other things to save resolution-independent textures and save memory space), their creation and programming also has its origins in the gaming scene.

The common techniques are usually summarized under the term shader programming. Until a few years ago there were only very few useful sources to learn about this topic, but now you can find and learn almost everything about it on the net. A nice source has just come to our attention, which we want to pass on to interested readers at this point:

An online book called: "The Book of Shaders" by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe They themselves describe it as a "gentle step-by-step guide through the abstract and complex universe of Fragment Shaders". And although the back chapters are not yet finished, we have to recommend the first chapters without reservation. Because here, the concept of shader programming is really conveyed in a very systematic and yet understandable way, which even for many "classic programmers" often seems quite unusual at first. However, a little bit of code experience is certainly necessary to understand the book at first. If only because in some parts of the book you can "live" modify the code.

Even the choice of languages is considerable and there is a

German translation which is quite useful at first sight. If you are interested in it, but haven&t found a good start yet, here you go...

more infos at bei thebookofshaders.com

deutsche Version dieser Seite: The Book of Shaders - Ein sanfter Einstieg in Prozedurale Effekte und Texturen