{"id":2618,"date":"2015-10-19T11:01:01","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T10:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.feedingedge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2618"},"modified":"2015-10-19T11:51:21","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T10:51:21","slug":"shady-maths-for-shaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.feedingedge.co.uk\/blog\/2015\/10\/19\/shady-maths-for-shaders\/","title":{"rendered":"Shady Maths for Shaders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

I like a good tech challenge and I decided to look a bit more into the world of shaders. I had not fully appreciated how many competing languages there were for these low level compute systems. I had used shaders in Unity3D and I knew we could do fancy things with them. They are wonderfully complicated and full of maths. As with all code you can go native and just write the code directly. There are also tools to help. Things like shadertoy<\/a> let you see some of the fun that can be had. It reminds me of hacking with the copper process in the old Amiga days. Low level graphics manipulation, direct to the pipeline.
\nIn Unity3d there is a tool I bought a while back called ShaderForge. It allows for editing of the shaders but in a visual way. Each little node shows the results of the maths that is going on in its own area. It is common to have this sort of material editing in 3D applications. There is a lot of maths available and I am only just skimming the surface of what can be done.
\nI was trying to create a realistic wood ring shader. I wanted to do something like that demonstrated here in normal code<\/a> (not any of the shader languages).
\nI ended up with something that looked like this.
\n\"ShaderForge<\/a>