Shader Academy: Learn Computer Graphics by Solving Challenges
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Shader Academy is a new platform for learning computer graphics by solving challenges, with users offering feedback and discussing the practical value of shader knowledge.
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Shader Park https://share.google/FgjTgechf1J3n4l5X
Just because Alpha go exist back in the days, go competition doesn’t go away. Just because ChatGpt exists these days, it doesn’t replace our desires of learning something more interactively.
ChatGPT can answer many things, but it seems miss the point if you use it for a website designed for learning.
If what you actually want to do is not really related to shader, there is a huge chance you have started your learning process in a wrong direction, which is a bit different to the definition of “being efficient”.
So tell me what you want to do.
There is no point where a vibe coder will put down their glasses and say “I will now write this code by hand”.
Yes, LLMs are sort of competent in many, many areas, but if you refuse to learn stuff the LLM can do, you will fail miserably to spot when the LLM is incompetent.
Because if the advanced problems are worth learning, but the basic problems are not worth learning, how are you supposed to jump straight to learning the advanced stuff while skipping the rest? You'll inevitably end up needing to learn the basics first anyway.
Also the ai-generated textures make it all the more likely that the rest of site is vibe-coded.
I'm not anti-ai per se, but using the defaults does affect my (and presumably others) impression of the quality of the site
How would you improve description of this challenge? As you can notice, we provide a lot of hints, description etc. for other challenges, but this one is vague on purpose.
Thank you
1) Make it clear that the lack of instructions is intentional
2) Have a "pixel inspection" tool so we can check the exact RGB values in the expected and diff images more easily.
Thank you!
More likely to be some kind of color space thresholding
https://shaderacademy.com/shaders/glsl/ranked_1/fragmentExpe...
But I still stand by the ai-gen'd aspect
Most challenges were created by us, but we use LLM for example to generate comments in the code or generate some simple boiler plate.
Sometimes, it is also useful to create similar challenge to already existing one.
I think people under-estimate how much of an effect the unreasonable complexity of modern front-end programming has had, especially outside of tech. My wife works in the non-profit world and I have been completely blown away by how much "designers" barely able to tweak a wordpress plugin get away with charging... She's an "AI skeptic" herself, but almost cried with joy when I showed her V0 [0].
[0] Not as good at coding as others, but probably the single most impressive AI product I've played with from a UX perspective.
Also, for the people interested in providing feedback, ideas for improvements, what you'd like us to build next, etc - feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/VPP78kur7C
I'm under impression that if I want to make an actual game, it makes no sense to do any of this stuff myself because the many existing game engines do it much better and faster out of the box and all the possible style choices in graphics are abstracted away into parameters in the engine.
Learning something new is always worthwhile, even if you have no immediate practical usecase for that knowledge.
Also, neither Unity or Unreal are a drop in replacement for shader programming. If you want to do anything advanced you'll need to get your hands dirty rolling your own GLSL/HLSL.
But the reason existing game engines already do it better is because well… there’s still people out there who learn low-level graphics and maintain / improve those engines. Right?
> game engines... all the possible style choices
Nah. Nope. Never happens.
Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL.
Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.
But this is more than just games. Shaders are how you program a GPU. There are plenty of use cases.
My point is, you can create more complex effects and provide them as a tool/out of the box effect (wrapper)
Maybe it's because I'm on my phone and I don't see the full UI, but I'm having trouble navigating the tutorial section.
I don't need the "hello world" basic tutorials, I'm looking to jump in to a point that meets where I am with GLSL - is there a TOC or something for the tutorials?
Some sort of path or progression that you can jump around on?
Existing works of art like iquilezles "Planet Fall" should be part of the recommended curriculum if only to inspire others and set the baseline for what's possible with shaders.
Do you think we should put these inspirations more on homepage?
> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.
[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...
[1] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...