Introduction to Shaders

Overview Shaders are everywhere, but these days you rarely have to write them yourself. Game engines come with a multitude of shaders which do everything from moving objects, scaling and rotating them, to coloring and texturing them, calculating lighting (perhaps using a physically-based rendering approach), and applying post-processing effects like bloom or HDR. But sometimes these built-in features are not enough: perhaps you’re going for a certain lighting aesthetic, want to create a unqiue special effect, or just need to improve the rendering performance....

November 10, 2024 · 18 min · Karl Bittner