Shaderlens

Shader Viewer

Shaderlens is an easy to use shader viewer, designed to make the process of writing shaders, and inspecting render results, as simple as possible.

Shaderlens is built to be compatible with Shadertoy's main features and conventions. It runs a sequence of fragment shaders, each rendering to its own framebuffer, and referencing other framebuffers and textures. It also provides compatible input texture, and built-in uniforms.

It supports source files hot reload, making it easy to work with any code editor.

Main options

Features

• Compatibility with Shadertoy.
• Source files hot reload.
• Render resolution, frame rate, and speed control.
• Intermediate passes buffers view.
• Pixel level inspection with scaling, panning and custom overlays.
• Project templates.
• Uniforms editor.
• Image sequence export, clipboard copy.
• Optional C# and Visual Studio workflow.
• Responsive UI, customizable inputs, themes.

Uniforms, and scaled pixel values

Getting Started

1. Download the latest release binaries.

2. Extract the files to any folder, and run Shaderlens.exe.

3. At the start page, click New... and create a new project.

4. Edit the project files with your favorite code editor, save to automatically re-compile the shader and see the results.

5. Right click on the viewport to open the main menu.
   Drag Ctrl + Mouse Middle Button to scale, and Mouse Middle Button to pan.

6. Refer to the documentation, for details about available features, inputs, and extending the project with more passes and textures.

Documentation and Examples

Documentation can be found here.
Project examples can be found under the examples folder.

Build from Source

• Prerequisite - Make sure WPF and .net 8.0 components are available in Visual Studio.
  Open "Visual Studio Installer", and click "Modify":

  • Under the "Workload" tab, make sure ".NET desktop development" is checked.
  • Under the "Individual Components" tab, make sure ".NET 8.0 Runtime (Long Term Support)" is checked.

• Clone the repository:

  git clone https://github.com/ytt0/shaderlens
  

• Build with dotnet:

  dotnet build
  

  • Open src\Shaderlens.App\bin\Debug\net8.0-windows\Shaderlens.exe.

  Alternatively use the publish target:

  dotnet publish
  

  • Open bin\Release\Shaderlens.exe.

• Build with Visual Studio:
  Open Shaderlens.sln, select Shaderlens.App as a Startup Project, and press F5.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.
The documentation is licensed under the CC0 license.