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3D Game Shaders for Beginners

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Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#21

Post by goldenkey »

This is really nice! The same techniques can be used in WebGL 2.0 which is at ES 3.1 on canary versions of WebKit. I had a hell of a time using the experimental compute shader API to implement a cellular automata framework [1]

The big issue with using WebGL at the current moment, to do large scale sims, is that fragment shaders dont have an entire workload barrier capability - so you cant do interdependent work.

Compute shaders have full workload execution and memory barriers.

Just something to be aware of if you are trying to jerry rig fragment shaders to do more advanced things like HDR via min/max over all colors..there is no way to these kind of aggregates without calling the shader twice, unfortunately.

[1] https://github.com/churchofthought/Grautamaton

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#22

Post by soup10 »

60654 wrote: post #3

That's a very cool intro to a variety of shader techniques, especially post-processing effects. What's even more wild, is that modern engines include all of this stuff out of the box, you just have to tick a few check boxes to enable them in your game. :) For example, check out these postprocessing filters built into Unity and Unreal - a ton of person-hours went into these: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PostProcess…

that's great but there's lots of reasons you may want to roll your own engine

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#23

Post by Ace17 »

p1necone wrote: post #8
barbwire wrote: post #4

Am I just out of touch with what the kids today are doing, or is this formatting really as bonkers as it seems? int main ( int argc , char *argv[] ) { // ... LColor backgroundColor = LColor ( generateLightColorPart(207, 1) , generateLightColorPart(154, 1) , generateLightColorPart(108, 1) , 1 ); // ... } I can (sort of) see that this makes it easy to comment out parameters - except for the first one...

I've noticed this formatting in sql scripts before too - the biggest benefit I see is making source control diffs only show one line changed rather than two when adding/removing lines.

The benefit (compared to more classic formatting) only occurs if you're inserting at the end of the argument list.

If adding stuff to the end of a class or of an argument list is your most frequent case, you might have a software design problem.

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#24

Post by zengid »

barbwire wrote: post #4

Am I just out of touch with what the kids today are doing, or is this formatting really as bonkers as it seems? int main ( int argc , char *argv[] ) { // ... LColor backgroundColor = LColor ( generateLightColorPart(207, 1) , generateLightColorPart(154, 1) , generateLightColorPart(108, 1) , 1 ); // ... } I can (sort of) see that this makes it easy to comment out parameters - except for the first one...

I see that occasionally in my works codebase. I don't mind it so much. Sometimes I'll see

    If(predicate
       && nextPredicate
       && lastPredicate)
    {
        DoStuff();
    }
Which I don't mind but also don't write. However, I do prefer ternary expressions like

    int someNum = somePred
        ? firstVal + 42
        : 1000;

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#25

Post by zengid »

soup10 wrote: post #22
60654 wrote: post #3

That's a very cool intro to a variety of shader techniques, especially post-processing effects. What's even more wild, is that modern engines include all of this stuff out of the box, you just have to tick a few check boxes to enable them in your game. :) For example, check out these postprocessing filters built into Unity and Unreal - a ton of person-hours went into these: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PostProcess…

that's great but there's lots of reasons you may want to roll your own engine

Especially if it's a 'smaller' game with mechanics that are unique. I just wonder if there are any good resources for the basics that a game engine needs.

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#26

Post by JacobiX »

60654 wrote: post #3

That's a very cool intro to a variety of shader techniques, especially post-processing effects. What's even more wild, is that modern engines include all of this stuff out of the box, you just have to tick a few check boxes to enable them in your game. :) For example, check out these postprocessing filters built into Unity and Unreal - a ton of person-hours went into these: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PostProcess…

I agree with you, however in almost all commercial games that I worked on, we do write our own shaders. For simple shaders, artists use directly a graphical tool included in unity for shaders authoring without writing any code, for complex ones we write our own code.

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#27

Post by PudgePacket »

zengid wrote: post #25
soup10 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's great but there's lots of reasons you may want to roll your own engine

Especially if it's a 'smaller' game with mechanics that are unique. I just wonder if there are any good resources for the basics that a game engine needs.

The advantage of writing your own "game engine" is that it would only have the exact set of features you need for your game, and it would make the things you need to achieve as fast and as easy as possible.

This means traditional advice for "the basics of a good game engine" doesn't really apply, because if you're just making a bog standard game engine you're wasting your time and making a crappier version of Unity or Unreal.

https://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not...

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#28

Post by wlesieutre »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #7

Cool! Is there a tutorial for cell shading? (The Borderlands 2 or Paper Mario look.)

Borderlands isn't cel shaded, it's just nice textures. To get that look you you need:

1) good texturing (including some linework and hatching)

2) diffuse only (more or less)

3) draw edges in black

Which is pretty vanilla techniques, shader wise. The hard part is doing the textures well.

Somebody on reddit did a character model walkthrough back in 2014: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2bftyc/i_reverse_e...

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#29

Post by all2 »

zengid wrote: post #25
soup10 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's great but there's lots of reasons you may want to roll your own engine

Especially if it's a 'smaller' game with mechanics that are unique. I just wonder if there are any good resources for the basics that a game engine needs.

THREE.js[0] is high enough level that it solves some basic problems (hierarchies of objects, basic materials, basic lighting, rendering pipeline) and low enough level that you still have high granularity control (you can roll your own shaders, lighting, render order, etc).

I don't know if anything like THREE exists for OpenGL, though.

The upshot of THREE is its super easy to develop with (alls you need is a browser). The downside is that it slows down very quickly for even simple things.

[0] https://threejs.org/

Re: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners

#30

Post by markdog12 »

goldenkey wrote: post #21

This is really nice! The same techniques can be used in WebGL 2.0 which is at ES 3.1 on canary versions of WebKit. I had a hell of a time using the experimental compute shader API to implement a cellular automata framework [1] The big issue with using WebGL at the current moment, to do large scale sims, is that fragment shaders dont have an entire workload barrier capability - so you cant do interdependent work. Comp…

A good talk at Google I/O that shows how shared memory can reduce shader work in a WebGPU context: https://youtu.be/K2JzIUIHIhc?t=1329
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