Demystifying GLSL Shaders

[hughsk]

I just finished putting together a WebGL animation that was presented at a local conference: http://run.south.im. I took a shot at making it without using three.js which lead to a lot of confusion at first but I learnt a lot from the process which I'd be interested in sharing with others.

The first thing I learnt is that the real "magic" in WebGL is all in the shaders: many newcomers mightn't realise, but that's where all the crazy fast performance comes from and the bulk of the work is done, making it possible to pull off some really nice effects in real time that you otherwise couldn't realistically achieve.

A lot of JavaScripters are a bit intimidated by shaders. To get started they essentially need to learn a new language, GLSL, and all the new considerations that come with it. Because we're still thinking in terms of our favorite language, it's easy to look at a real-time dynamically lit 3D scene and wonder how that even works at a reasonable speed.

Unfortunately a lot of the documentation online is specifically targeted towards three.js, and hence skips over the fundamentals of how things are actually put on the screen.

The truth is that shaders aren't magical, or scary, just misunderstood. Once you're over the initial hurdle of thinking like a GPU, things start to fall into place and you can begin to reap the benefits.

I'd like to talk about these fundamentals, and put them into practice by building up a simple 3D scene step-by-step - most likely by recreating a short segment of the animation I mentioned above.

The last talk I gave was on browserify and game development at CampJS and a local meetup, there's a video here (low quality) along with slides. Very much open to feedback and flexible in terms of the topic/scope if this is of interest :)

[mikeal]

👍

[hughsk]

Hey @mikeal, any word on this?

[mikeal]

more things will be announced soon.

[hughsk]

No worries :)

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On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Mikeal Rogers notifications@github.com
wrote:

more things will be announced soon.

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