GLSL Lesson 4: Reshaping Light and Shadow with pow() Previous Lessons Lesson 1 Your First Shader: Painting the Entire Screen One Color In the first lesson, we learned the simplest thing a fragment shader

In the first lesson, we learned the simplest thing a fragment shader can do: paint every pixel the same color. In the second lesson, we moved beyond a flat color and started creating gradients. Instead

In the previous lesson, Your First Shader: Painting the Entire Screen One Color, we learned that a shader can fill the entire canvas with a single color by writing values into gl_FragColor. If you missed

So far we have been looking at code and breaking it apart piece by piece. That approach is useful, but there is another way to learn shaders that is often more effective: Change things and see what happens.

One of the recurring themes in learning GLSL is encountering pieces of code that seem completely unnecessary. You learn about vectors. You learn about coordinates. You start reading examples from The Book

If gradients were the first time color became a relationship, HSB is where color starts behaving like a coordinate system. This is lesson 9 in the series, and it sits right after gradients — not as an

Most people think shaders begin with shapes, or light, or noise. But they don’t. They begin with a line, and what you choose to do with distance along that line. This code, pulled from The Book of Shaders,

Here's the strange part. Gaming is booming, revenue is up, more people are playing than ever, yet companies like Xbox are making moves that look like panic, not confidence. Pushing hard toward digital

There's a reason gaming keeps grabbing headlines lately: it's not a trend anymore, it's dominance. Year over year, game revenue has been climbing steadily, and the total money generated by games now roughly

One of the recurring themes in learning GLSL is encountering pieces of code that seem completely unnecessary. You learn about vectors. You learn about coordinates. You start reading examples from The Book

Lesson: 8 There’s something strangely alive about this kind of shader. Nothing moves, nothing is drawn in the traditional sense, yet the screen never stays the same. It quietly shifts between two colors,

If you filled your screen with completely random values, the result would look like television static. Every pixel would be different from the one beside it. Nature rarely looks like that. Clouds change

Color in GLSL is one of the first things that makes shader programming feel alive. You go from abstract math to something visible, expressive, and instantly creative. At its core, GLSL color is surprisingly

UV coordinates are one of the most fundamental ideas in GLSL, yet they are often misunderstood when you first start working with shaders. At their core, UVs are simply a way to describe position inside

One question almost every shader beginner asks is whether vector components such as .r, .g, .b, .x, .y, and .z are fixed values or special constants. The short answer is no. They are simply labels used

When most people start learning shaders, textures seem straightforward. They are images made up of pixels. But in GLSL, textures are much more than images. They are data containers, and understanding how

When most people start learning shaders, textures seem straightforward. They are images made up of pixels. But in GLSL, textures are much more than images. They are data containers, and understanding how

This is the fourth post in the GlSL learning series. Learning GLSL as a Beginner Understanding gl-Position: My First Real Vertex Shader Fragment Shaders Made Simple: What gl-FragColor Does What This Shader

This is the fifth post in the GLSL learning series. Previous posts: Learning GLSL as a Beginner Understanding gl_Position: My First Real Vertex Shader Fragment Shaders Made Simple: What gl_FragColor Does

Look at images captured by space telescopes. Galaxies are filled with glowing clouds of gas and dust. Some regions appear bright blue. Others glow purple, pink, or orange. The colors blend together smoothly