Today I demonstrated for my computer graphics students how I make various things with procedural shaders, like realistic looking marble and dramatic animated clouds. In each case, the key parts of the shader took up only a handful of code.<\/p>\n
The fact that rich looking materials could be created in just a few lines of code might have seemed to them like magic. So on one level the experience was very satisfying for everyone.<\/p>\n
But on another level it was very unsatisfying. Because there are deeper reasons why these shaders work, and those reasons are very difficult to teach.<\/p>\n
Procedural shaders work because of a complex combination of art and math and human perception of physical phenomena. To unpack the full meaning contained within a few lines of code might require weeks of study.<\/p>\n
So on some level it was fun to be able to say, “Hey, to make an amazing thing, you just need to do this.” But on another level, I know I wasn’t really able to teach them exactly what “this” is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I demonstrated for my computer graphics students how I make various things with procedural shaders, like realistic looking marble and dramatic animated clouds. In each case, the key parts of the shader took up only a handful of code. The fact that rich looking materials could be created in just a few lines of … Continue reading “Unpacking procedural shaders”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23660,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23659\/revisions\/23660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}