I have been interested in computer graphics for a long time but never really interested enough to make some positive steps toward it. Like a lot of people, I have tried to get a basic app working in OpenGL or DirectX but never really got very far. It was all a bit intimidating.
However things have changed. These days, on DirectX, there are a load of fantastic tutorials on the internet, as well as seriously helpful libraries. If you’re interested in getting some physics working there’s a few good books and often the content is backed up with source code. For WebGL (which is a flavour of OpenGL) there’s great tutorials to help, and really cool insights into how it works.
There’s quite a lot to take in before you can really grok what the graphics pipeline does, whatever API flavour you chose. It was whilst trying to figure out how shaders work that I stumbled across some stunning examples of what is possible. What I didn’t realise, at first, is that the examples I was looking at are simply fragment shaders.
If you don’t know how 3D graphics works you might say ‘so what?’. But let’s just say it’s not the easy route to getting 3D computer graphics done – not to me anyway. The mathematics involved looks in a lot of ways harder, but the programming looks way easier. Programming this way is mostly declarative, there’s no bonkers API and there are far fewer loops because the magic is in the power of the GPU and the shader loop.
My only problem is that shadertoy.com doesn’t quite work how I want it to. For one thing it keeps timing out (guess they need more funds, so I added some through Patreon), but that aside I wanted a bit more control over the shader and how it can be embedded. Partially for this blog but also to learn a bit more WebGL.
That happened two weeks ago. I’ve been messing around trying to get something working for this site and making some embeddable shaders that I can embed directly here. I think I’m almost there …