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.
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.
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!
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);
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
