The Book of Shaders

by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo

This is a gentle step-by-step guide through the abstract and complex universe of Fragment Shaders.

Contents

• About this book

• Getting started

  • What is a shader?
  • “Hello world!”
  • Uniforms
  • Running your shader

• Algorithmic drawing

  • Shaping functions
  • Colors
  • Shapes
  • Matrices
  • Patterns

• Generative designs

  • Random
  • Noise
  • Fractional brownian motion
  • Fractals

• Image processing:

  • Textures
  • Image operations
  • Kernel convolutions
  • Filters
  • Others effects

• Simulation

  • Pingpong
  • Conway
  • Ripples
  • Water color
  • Reaction diffusion
  • Voronoi

• 3D graphics

  • Lights
  • Normal-maps
  • Bump-maps
  • Ray marching
  • Environmental-maps (spherical and cube)
  • Reflect and refract

• Examples

• Glossary

• Appendix: Other ways to use this book

  • How can I navigate this book offline?
  • How to run the examples on a RaspberryPi?
  • How to print this book?

About the Author

Patricio Gonzalez Vivo (1982, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a New York based artist and developer. He explores interstitial spaces between organic and synthetic, analog and digital, individual and collective. In his work he uses code as an expressive language with the intention of developing a better together.

Patricio studied and practiced psychotherapy and expressive art therapy. He holds an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons The New School, where he now teaches. Currently he works as a Graphic Engineer at Mapzen making openSource mapping tools.

Twitter - GitHub - Vimeo - Flickr

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my wife Jen Lowe, for her unconditional support, help and time editing this book.

Thanks Scott Murray for the inspiration and advice.

Thanks Karim Naaji for contributing with support, good ideas and code.

Thanks to everyone who has believed in this project and contributed with fixes or donations: Andreas Wilcox, Jonathan Jin, James Phillips, Drew Lustro, Mike Reinstein, Bradley Bossard, Nestor Rubio Garcia, Magnus Öberg, Kyle Stewart, Al Matthews, Michael Parisi, Gerry Straathof and Matthias Treitler