It’s November!

It is now the month of November, and the focus of this month’s theme is going to be “Visuals.” We’re going to try and have a diverse set of puzzles that focus on making something interactive and/or visually engaging. This week we are looking at shaders. Not sure what those are? This week we’re going to find out!

Background

To keep it brief, a shader is basically a special kind of computer program used in computer graphics. As its name implies, it was originally used to shade within an image, particularly as it relates to light sources in relation to 3D objects. Nowadays, shaders are used to do much more in the field of computer graphics such as create special effects in video games and movies or do some cool post-processing. If you want to read a little more, where other than to start with Wikipedia.

Today’s Challenge

Today is all about trying a new technology and gaining a new experience. Never worked with shaders before? No worries, we have just the starter pack for you. Today we will be working with ShaderToy.

Now none of us in D-HAC are masters at creating shaders (that’s why we are doing this weeks challenge), so we’ve collected a couple of tutorials to get us all started at learning how to work with shaders. At any point, if you feel confident enough to break off and create your own thing or you get a cool idea, run with it. We want to see what cool things people can come up with by next week! Here are our selected tutorials:

• A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders
• How to Create Animated Shaders With ShaderToy
• GLSL 2D Tutorial
• The Book of Shaders