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 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.

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

When you look into the night sky, the stars seem randomly scattered. Some are bright. Some are barely visible. Some appear grouped together while others sit alone. Although they look random, we can recreate

Look at the sky on a clear day. Clouds rarely have sharp edges. They slowly grow, merge together, drift across the horizon, and disappear. If you look closely, you'll notice large cloud formations filled

Think about standing beside a lake on a sunny day. The water is not one solid color. Bright highlights appear where sunlight hits the waves. Some parts look dark. Others reflect the sky. These differences

Water is always moving. Sometimes it forms gentle ripples across a lake. Sometimes it crashes into waves. Sometimes it reflects the sky so clearly that it almost looks like glass. Although real water is

Smoke behaves very differently from fire. Fire is energetic. Smoke drifts slowly. It spreads outward. It fades into the air. Instead of sharp movements, smoke relies on soft transitions and gradual changes.

Look at the cross section of a tree trunk. You'll notice a series of rings spreading outward from the center. These rings aren't perfectly smooth. They bend. They twist. They become thinner in some places

Walk through an old building made from marble and you'll notice something interesting. No two pieces look exactly alike. Every slab contains flowing veins. Some areas are bright. Others are dark. The lines