So i am moreso used to the artist aspect, but i was wondering if ther was a good place to start in looking to write and develop shaders that work well in game engines?
I started poking around in unity, you get quick feedback and as far as I know the translation to hlsl is minimal
For unity cg:
this series of videos is good, if you can parse a strong kiwi accent.
http://cgcookie.com/unity/cgc-courses/noob-to-pro-shader-writing-for-unity-4-beginner/
this wiki page is excellent, and what our graphics programmer pointed me at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cg_Programming/Unity
Some of unity’s implementaion of CG is unity specific , but much of it is general to CG/HLSL
Maya 2015 has Shader FX, which is a node-based shader authoring tool. Pretty cool for mocking up shaders.
Hey, I’m also ongoing learning shader programming. The cgcookie.com tutorials that Mambo4 mentioned I’ve gone through before, it’s really helpful. I’ve also done some shaders using the node based shader editor in Unity called Strumpy Shader Editor, where you can learn basic breakdowns of what makes a shader in a visual manner. Strumpy Shader Editor | Visual Scripting | Unity Asset Store and it’s Free!
There’s also Shader Forge I havent tried it, but also seems awesome, but it’s not free. Hope this helps!
I also post the source code for CGFX shaders I write on my website. I tried to build everything similarly with a lot of inline comments, so that if someone wants to learn and is just starting out they could just start at the beginning and work their way through it like I did. They may not be the most advanced shaders out there but I think a few of them are kinda neat.
You can find them here: artisticexperiments.com/shaders I haven’t been posting new ones as much recently as I got distracted by other tasks, but if anyone has some feedback or things they would like to see I would LOVE to hear it. Hope it helps someone!
Thank you all for the great responces/helpful replys. I was wondering do you guys have any resources pertaining to custom lit shaders? Im trying to construct a cel shader or atleast i think i am. Im not sure if it should be cel, ramp or matcap.
Shadertoy is really really cool for quickly prototyping stuff aswell