Shaders. A mysterious and magical part of computer graphics, loved by those who understand them and feared by those who are yet to fall for them. Shaders are an extremely powerful tool, not only to quickly render visual shapes and relationships but also to play, explore and discover new effects. In this workshop we will show you how to use shaders to let your creativity flow.

You will learm

• To love shaders with the same unhealthy passion that we do.

• The basic concept of working with shaders.
• To mathematically describe shapes, colors and transformations.
• Some idea on how to integrate shaders into your own projects.
• You will be equipped with enough knowledge to continue expanding your understanding of shaders. You will know where and how to look for more information.

Shader – by Max Kolyanov

In addition to the basics of programming shaders, we will also explain some simple mathematical concepts fundemental to the techniques we will be using. The workshop will focus on developing shaders for the web, but we will also touch on how shaders might be used in your own work, with applications such as Processing, OpenFrameworks and Blender etc.

Our introduction to shaders will equip you with a versitile and distinctive tool for your creative toolbox and make you the envy of all your friends.

What are shaders?

Shaders are a set of instructions that are executed on the graphics card to create images or do parallel computations. They are a fast and powerful language to describe visual effects and images, used in video games, 3D modeling and pretty much any graphical application you can name.

Rhodium shader by Alcatraz visualised here.

Shaders allow (or require) you to describe your visuals more mathematically. This has two advantages compared to the usual approach:

• First, it is much faster because it runs on your graphics card and most operations are hardware accelerated. This allows you to draw much more complex sceneries, in real-time, without having to reduce the amount of objects you want to draw or wait a long time until this drawing process, called rendering, finishes.
• Secondly, the declarative nature of shaders leads to a completely different discovery process. Navigating the visual possibility space of shaders is a very playful and curious process and often creates visuals that surprise you in the end.

Chromo Inferno – by Parisj (Shadertoy.com)

Shaders are often seen as intimidating because they require a different way of thinking about your program, compared to more conventional (serial) programming languages. By using a playful and creative approach you can use “thinking as a graphics card” to create and discover visuals that might be too complicated to do alone in widely used creative programming environments (e.g. OpenFrameworks or Processing).

About the Workshop

This workshop is geared towards artists, designers and creatives who have a little coding experience and are curious about the world of shaders. We would like to break the ice between you and shaders and allow you to continue exploring them freely, if you desire.

The shader language we will be using is GLSL, run in a web browser through WebGL. This requires no setup, as we will be able to edit shaders directly in the browser and see changes immediately.

Women and persons from LGBTQ+ and other under-represented communities in the tech field highly encouraged to attend.

Requirements

• A laptop that runs a modern web browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
• Basic programming knowledge (if you know what variables, functions and loops are, you will be fine)*

*If you don’t know the basics, consider signing up for our upcoming intro class to prepare for this shader workshop