What Are Shaders?

Further Reading/Watching:

Please let me know if you see resources owned by you in this video and I have not credited you!

[daggawagga]

This is the best shader high level intro I've ever seen. So many introductions are either not succint or focus too much on something too specific for a intro.

[TehBurek]

Kudos for drawing attention to independent and parallel execution of shader code, as someone who teaches this stuff in computer graphics class, I want to stress that also. That answers many questions from people coming from "regular" CPU programming and adjusting to this, like "why can't I pass a variable to next pixel?" or "why's there no random function?", etc. Shaders are (mostly) meant to be fire-and-forget, no waiting around, no syncing with each other, otherwise the performance would crumble. This way, you can have massive parallelism, litereally thousands of real hardware threads running simultaneously, without worrying about it.

[flake]

You have an amazing way with words! Easy, EASY to align my thought process with what you're saying. I specifically thought the word "Bucket" and you said it less than 2 seconds later.

[dealloc]

I think it's important to distinguish between the two kinds of shaders. Namely the vertex and fragment. Where fragment shaders are done for every pixel (therefore also known as a pixel shader), vertex shaders are done on every vertex. The order of the shaders are also key; Fragment shaders are applied _after_ Vertex shaders.

So in this video the pixel shading (colors changing) are fragment shaders, whereas cell shading (toon shading) uses vertex shading, since they have to extrude from the model in order to make the outline around the models. The color of the outline are then applied by the fragment shader.

[tufekci]

Love your videos. You sum up even complex subjects so nicely. Not so nerdy and not so shallow.

[safebox]

_doing Computer Graphics assignment_
Me: The f*** is a shader?
TheHappyCat: _this video_

[umeshkumarasamy]

Where were you all this time?
I've been looking everywhere
for knowledge about shade
and you've shown me the light

[slowdragon]

i dont know how but you nailed the timing of publishing this video. Just in time. Like some superhero.

[ewaldikemann]

Very nice intro into a very complex theme. Even when it comes shading of objects in a 3d space with multiple light sources and various calculation techniques.
I'm looking forward to the next part - thumps up!

[carterpryor]

Seeing your videos on things like this make me really want to get up and experiment! Thanks for another awesome video!

[yuliyasherstyuk]

43 people are from Australia and clicked thumbs up, but it came out upside down

[GingerAle]

Wow. Finally I got an understanding what is shaders.
It's a piece of code, in which you put every pixel of an object, related to this shader. It makes some calculations, depends on what nodes you put inside. Then it returns a color value for these pixels, to render it on screen.

[ImTheBestJamie]

Ive always liked lighting in games as far as graphics are concerned, so its interesting to learn whats actually happening. Im looking forwards to the code :)

[TheMahotizer]

I just discovered your channel, and I’m so happy YouTube recommended it to me. I’m a design student in college and a lot of things that are interesting to me are jam packed into this video. I also love how you take time to explain various concepts in detail

[paulkyle]

That was actually helpful. Now I finally understand what shaders are 👏🔥

[allansh]

nice to see people willing to sponsor this channel

[NiemandKatzchen]

I wish that this video existed when I first started learning shaders, very good high level introduction and explanation.

[guiguiregismercer]

Loved it, please make more video about shaders, lighting and techniques! Thanks

[johnhammer]

Thanks for precisely pointing out pixel shader is a function applied to all pixels which takes position as the argument and does not depend on the adjacent pixels.

Are all the other shaders also depened only on the postion and does not care about the values of other entities ?

[ddud]

I always wish Photoshop had a shader language like Maya Hypershader except for 2D layers, that would be so powerful compared to their fixed blending options.