Making Art With Your Graphics Card: Intro to Shaders

Fragment shaders are programs that generate images on your computer's graphics card by computing the color of each pixel on the screen simultaneously. Because they run in parallel, fragment shaders are really fast, which makes them a powerful tool for creative coding, game development, and live video performance.

In this workshop, we'll discuss how to think about computation in parallel and go over the basics of the GLSL shader programming language. For the sake of simplicity and time, we'll focus on 2D animation and image processing, but we'll touch briefly on how the same techniques could be applied to 3D graphics. We'll also talk about how to use shaders in creative coding frameworks like Processing, openFrameworks, and Max/MSP/Jitter. By the end of the workshop, you'll hopefully be able to read and understand other people's GLSL shader code, and maybe even feel comfortable writing your own shaders!

This workshop is aimed at people with a basic understanding of programming and an interest in computer graphics. You should already be familiar with concepts like variables, if statements, and functions. You should bring a computer, but we'll be using a browser-based editor for GLSL examples, so you won't need to set anything up beforehand.

All of the slides and code examples can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/oshoham/making-art-with-your-graphics-card.