Shader Writing - recommendations?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey everyone.

I wanted to ask if anyone could suggest some resources for learning more about building/writing shaders. To preface, I am an artist without a technical background. As I get more into games/game engines, I find making shaders fascinating. I’d love to learn more from the ground up, but I don’t really know where to start. Would anyone have any recommendations for books or other sources? Any math I should start learning? It’s such a daunting subject for me, but I would love to break into it. Thanks for the help!

2

If i may post external l inks (Please remove if not allowed). Microsoft has a nice library sharing the whole how to on HLSL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb509635(v=vs.85).aspx

I think eat3d as well has a nice dvd on CGFX if i remember correctly : http://eat3d.com/shaders_intro

3

Thanks DieByZer0! Seems like quite a bit of information in those links. This should be a good start!

4

You might want to start looking at some maths as well such as vectors, matrices (world/view/projection) and the differences between them. Both the dot and cross products along with trigonometry are used in many shaders. You will need quite a strong understanding of maths really as you look more deeply into shader code as you will not only need to understand what each bit is doing, but also translate formulae and equations into implementations and vice versa.

It may also be worth looking into texturing, UV coordinates, normal maps and general lighting equations. To get you started, look at basic examples such as lighting an actual object with a specific method like Blinn-phong/Lambertian shading.