A Series of Tricks and Techniques I Learned Doing Tiny Glsl Demos

I started 2-3 months ago or so doing this stuff, so don't be too intimidated to start. Especially with the two articles (Red Alp and this one), it should make it more accessible, hopefully :)

I'm glad it reaches an audience :)

> Only critique is.. if you're sharing to teach, your compact/one line [460] char GLSL code is a poor delivery mechanism.

Understandable. Though, the demos are here to illustrate "what you can do with the trick I'm sharing". It's like, I'm teaching you how to do watercolor, and illustrate it with some paintings you won't be able to perform just with that knowledge. They're meant to inspire you to create. You're not looking at a tutorial, you're looking at art.

For once instead of being shoved a ready-made solution there's a short explanation of the core idea with a live example, but instead of a fully documented shadertoy it's like the answer is ROT13'd which makes me itch for implementing a solution myself.

I gave some directions and resources in a comment here, it might help you: https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1pgqis...

> And GLSL syntax looks a bit tedious to be honest, but I'd love to dive in.

With the vectorization everywhere, it's surprisingly convenient given how simple the syntax is. I personally just miss some sinpi/cospi/etc, and/or a PI and TAU constant.

My theory is that graphics programmers, at some point, stop having to care very much about what the textual representation of their program actually looks like. Because graphics programming is so hard, once you get to the point of understanding what you're doing, and typing in the shader, it becomes self-explanatory; you don't actually need variable names, what you need is understanding.

Inigo Quilez (author of shadertoy, and graphics programming legend) is one of the most talented graphics programmers alive, and produces some of the least readable code I've ever seen.

Just my 2c on why this is so common in graphics, specifically

For my tastes this is excessive (especially since the formatting is non-existent), but you do pay a cost for longer variable names. There's only so much you can grok when reading a passage, and long names hinder any higher-level understanding of what that passage actually does, requiring you to resort to carefully thinking about the problem rather than any shortcuts and insights your powerful visual cortex might provide.