vertex shader

The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.

A short ShaderToy piece by Martijn Steinrucken (The Art of Code) that renders rain on a windshield during a night drive, with blurred bokeh lights. It is set to music.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

A one-minute demo comparing RetroArch shaders on the Sonic the Hedgehog waterfall, where Sega Genesis dithering creates a transparency effect. It shows how different shaders emulate the CRT look.

A Remedy engineer explains how Alan Wake 2 moved to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline built on mesh shaders, culling and rendering meshlets for dense vegetation on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.

Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.

A game-dev video demonstrating a noise shader in Godot where shapes are visible only in motion against animated noise and vanish when the game is paused or screenshotted. The demo is available on GitHub.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

Intrinsic Gravity is a real-time demoscene production by Still, made with the Tooll tool for Under Construction 2014. It is a black-and-white op-art animation with a soundtrack by hoffman.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.