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Comment by superMayo | Hacker News Reader

I finally found the courage to write and expose myself to the internet. I've always wanted to learn shaders so I thought it would be nice to document my learning and share it with others.

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I just commend you for writing on your own blog and making an interactive post; as opposed to some shitty Notion/Medium/Dev feed the google-algorithm, AI copy pasta.

Honest blogging is dying in the shadows, unseen of the god almighty algorithm. It's sad times. We're deep in the Star Wars episode IV of the Internet.

My only feedback is, merci and more of it please!

Welcome to the Internet, superMayo!

If you want to see what the Masters can do with shaders, let me introduce you to Inigo Quilez and his shader art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE

EDIT: I did not notice you are the author of this article. It's very well done, and I've been looking for more approachable and interactive tutorials on the arts of shader coding.

That was an amazing video, thanks for sharing! I really appreciate that there's a link to the shader code as well. Makes me want to dive into graphics again!

If we're going to do the link to IQ, then probably should link to Shadertoy, where there are several thousand shaders to look at for ideas.

IQ's personal page on Shadertoy: https://www.shadertoy.com/user/iq/sort=newest&from=576&num=8

Shadertoy is created by Beautypi (Inigo Quilez and Pol Jeremias).

And all of IQ's introductory articles on using Shadertoy.

// Input - Keyboard : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsXGzf

// Input - Microphone : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/llSGDh

// Input - Mouse : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Mss3zH

// Input - Sound : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xds3Rr

// Input - SoundCloud : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MsdGzn

// Input - Time : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsXGz8

// Input - TimeDelta : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsKGWV

// Inout - 3D Texture : https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4llcR4

You can improve your antialiasing, assuming you're willing to use the well-supported OES_standard_derivatives extension (or WebGL 2). Instead of doing smoothstep(0.0f, 0.01f, dist); with the constants picks sort of at random, instead do smoothstep(fwidth(dist), -fwidth(dist), dist);

Didn't know that, thanks for the tip!

This feels like the absolute best way to give an introduction to shaders, given that they're completely graphical. The way the interactive code is embedded within the article, instead of being a link to an excercise works super well.

Thanks a lot for making this, keep doing what you do!

This post got me to log in to thank you for taking the time to write this, and to congratulate you on how enlightening it is.

Tangential to the main topic, what generative art artists are you following and/or where did you look to find them?

I found a couple myself (@D_VISION7 @lv374 @beesandbombs @HAL09999), but ran into roadblocks trying to find more. There are a few fractals here and there, etc. Shadertoy seemed mostly like math demos/challenges rather than art, or at least it doesn't have an easy way to find the artsy ones.

Here’s a few artists you might like: @FEELSxart @ilithya_rocks @generativelight @thresfold @Tezumies @_nonfigurativ_ @Olga_f2727

Can only recommend checking out https://www.fxhash.xyz/. It's an NFT platform for generative art. Think of NFTs what you will but that platform really brought together lots of artists and in my opinion the field has advanced a lot these past two years due to that platform existing.

Personally I really like @KilledByAPixel and @piterpasma simply from a technical perspective. If you're into vector / plotting work @zancan is definitely worth checking out.

On mastodon you can follow hashtags, so follow #generative, #procedural, #creativecoding etc, not just people; you get a lot of serendipitous finds this way. What shows up on the different tags varies a bit: #generativeart picks up a lot more AI-generated guff, not interesting to me at all, while #generative tends to get less of that and more hand-coded art.

I do find a lot of NFT pollution in these tags so I've got words related to that filtered out.

I follow some actual people too and you can find good follows from who they RT but following tags made mastodon much better for me than t**ter ever was, and actually makes it worthwhile posting with tags.

This is very cool, just what i needed actually.

Also your website is very sleek, minimal and your projects are tasteful.

This article is super fun. Thanks! I was curious if you’ve learned WGSL, the shader language for WebGPU? I’m struggling to wrap my head around what’s similar and different.. a fun and interactive guide like you’ve done here with GLSL would be amazing.

https://webgpufundamentals.org/ is only a few months old and is the best WebGPU resource I've found.

Thanks for sharing! I started learning about the Godot Engine recently, and I was just beginning to fiddle with shaders. This was an excellent article to give me a few more points to start with. But, oh boy, the curve is steep.

Looks like a good way to introduce newbies to the world of shaders, many thanks for putting this out, I already have a recipient in mind for this content.

Impeccable timing, I was just about to try and get into shaders. Thank you so much for writing this, I will be reading it on the weekend.

First sentence: "What if I told you that it could takeS..."

You might want to correct that. Now reading on :)

The Mona Lisa paint cannon is an incredible GIF, do you know where that's from?

Looks like it's from a talk the MythBusters guys did at NVISION 08: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3OGgBkRiQ

Thank you!

Nice work - this is really cool!

Don't be shy, I guarantee that I'm worse at shaders than you are. Thanks for your effort

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