The Book of Shaders

A very small piece of advice which I don't see mentioned here: OpenGL works in linear RGB (which is very convenient), while your monitor displays sRGB (which gives you better colour resolution due to how eyes work). This means that outputting the result of OpenGL directly on your screen is wrong (a lot dimmer than it should be). Use this little fragment in all your shaders to convert the final output to sRGB:

    vec3 srgb(vec3 rgb) {
        vec3 mask = vec3(greaterThan(rgb, vec3(0.0031308)));
        return mix(rgb * 12.92,
                   pow(rgb, vec3(1.0 / 2.4)) * 1.055 - 0.055,
                   mask);
    }

Edit: Here's a very good example of the difference https://imgur.com/a/g6qNI

Edit 2: And of course when you load textures you must tell OpenGL they're in sRGB colourspace (most probably they are, if you created them on a normal monitor), so it will do the reverse transformation when reading from the texture. All this trouble could have been avoided if monitors were 30bit linear RGB colourspace to begin with, but that's history now. C'est la vie.

What I read so far is great, but I noticed this gem about preprocessor directives:

    All the macro comands begin with a hashtag (#). 

Do we really call every hash character a hashtag now?! :)

Toby Schachman made a similar attempt at writing an interactive book about shader programming, but sadly it hasn't been updated in a long time.

http://pixelshaders.com

Hopefully this site won't meet the same fate!

This is awesome! As someone who just spent a ton of time navigating a patchwork of information about GLSL, this looks like an oasis :) (I can't seem to access all the chapters though, I guess its a work in progress).

This looks great. Is there a way to easily take it offline so I can read it on my Kindle? Also...

> If you are reading this book in a browser the previous block of code is interactive. That means you can click and change any part of the code you want to explore.

Now that's pretty damn cool!

This really needs an email list for updates as more content is added. And maybe a Patreon account as well :D

Finally. 50 Shaders of Grey.

I can only encourage the author to continue. It's a really enjoyable way to learn things. I like how he challenges my in a tutorial.

Although I haven't tried it, here is an NPM package for learning shaders: https://www.npmjs.com/package/shader-school

Great work, it's apparent a lot of thought went into the presentation and teachings.

I'm guessing there are lots of developers out there who don't realize that shaders are quite accessible for simple tasks even without much of a math or graphics background and/or that power is now available is most web browsers.

Thanks for this!

Edit: great illustrations, too!

This is pretty cool. I'll read this. Thanks!

What an incredibly beautiful piece of design. I can't remember the last time I was so inspired by careful use of typesetting and white space.

What an incredibly beautiful piece of design. I can't remember the last time I was so inspired by careful use of typesetting and white space.

This would be great material for a GitBook: https://www.gitbook.com/