Me And Shaders
When I had first come in contact with shaders, I've been ~8 years younger. Back then, I first started to learn to program with the DirectX SDK. I never really understood shaders back then, and they were annoying. I never really did anything with them. From there on out, it took seven years until I came across them again during studying when I saw the project of a fellow student talking about his shaders. The game looked amazing. One semester later, in the Realtime graphics course, we were taught DirectX as well as shaders. It was- fascinating but pretty technical. It wasn't until I took the "Modern Techniques for Shader Development and Imagesynthesis" course.
The Epiphany
Until then, I didn't think much about shaders, but the courses made me realize how important they are and how easy it is to write them. Most of the animations, particle systems, post-processing effects, and other things making your games more beautiful, are probably done using shaders. Vertex shaders, geometry shaders, fragment shaders, image effect or post-processing shaders, and compute shaders give you the power to push your games to a new level of aesthetics and beauty.
What If Shaders Are Not Your Thing?
Of course, it's not the end of the world if you don't write your shaders. There are shader assets out there that you can get. You can make other people write them for you (like me :P), and most engines come with standard shaders. So, no one is forcing you to get into writing shaders. However, I still want to make you realize how important they are and that it is possible to create great things with them.
How To Get Started?
The university course I took taught all techniques by using case studies. So, get out there, take a game and try to recreate the effect. Oh wait, maybe you should start with some tutorials on the basics first. Read into how Vertex and Fragment shaders work and make your own in Unity since you can get started right away there. Check for some websites that teach shading while using case studies. The tutor of the course has a website called lexdev.net.
Shimmy, Shimmy... Out And Away
That's it from my side for today. I'll come back with more posts eventually, especially after the exam phase. Also, I started to use Grammarly again, given your feedback on the blog posts that didn't use it compared to the ones that do. Thanks for that feedback, btw. Oh yeah, I could write my case study or tutorials in the future.
