Good books or tutorials for shaders?

[Masterhawk]

First of all I'm sorry if there is another thread which already deals with this topic but this forum is currently driving me nuts....I'm happy to have reached this site to post this thread (hope I'll be able to send it after finishing^^)

To the topic: I've reached some point in my project to think about the next steps. So the next big part of the development will be the improvement of the graphics, mainly with shaders. And there is the problem, I don't have any clue about shaders
So the time has come to learn creating schaders.

What language do you prefer, HLSL or GLSL? My project is set up to OGL, so I thought to learn GLSL first because I don't have to change the OGL-specific part to DX then. Anyway I heard GLSL is a less complicated than its pendant.
Or what's about Cg?


What do you think about this book? Does anyone learned shading with this book. Are there any better books?
http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-R-Shading- ... 800&sr=8-1

What about online-tutorials? Any recommandable?

thx in advance, masterhawk

[arras]

GLSL:

Orange Book:
http://www.3dshaders.com/home/

some official docs:
http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/GLSL ... 1.20.8.pdf
http://www.mew.cx/glsl_quickref.pdf

lots of info and links at wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLSL

tutorials:
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/tutorials/TyphoonLabs/
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/tutorials/
http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/articles/a ... article=21
http://www.clockworkcoders.com/oglsl/tutorials.html
http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glsl/
http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/glsl_l ... _phong.php
http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/glsl_fog/index.php
http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/bump_mapping.php
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/progra ... efault.asp

You may find some info and lots of code (made for Irrlicht) in this post:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=26057

I plan to make some GLSL-Irrlicht tutorial ...sometimes

[Halifax]

Well some good books would definitely be GPU Gems 1, 2, and 3 would they not? I have not used them personally, but I hear some good things about them.

Arras laid out some good links for you, especially lighthouse3d, you should really check those out. And niko even wrote his own little shader tutorials to show you how to integrate shaders with Irrlicht.

[FuzzYspo0N]

Well some good books would definitely be GPU Gems 1, 2, and 3 would they not?

technically no,

becuase you are on the forefront of shading technology with more then next generation graphics. unless you are at a level of understanding the immensely complex things they delve into, its just pretty pictures.
Its not a learning source, its reference for the advancement of shading technologies...

If you have ever seen anything from the demoscene, you will know those guys know their shaders well. I posted on the demoscene forums about this very topic and i said :

Iv been using shaders and working on my own for quite some time but it seems resources are quite scarce.
GPU gems are great, glsl books are great, examples with rendermonkey and FX composer are all quite good resources...
But outside of that where do you learn? Are there communities of shader developers? are there guys giving information and examples of simple things as well as the excessively complex?

The reply from the site owner was :

Hi,

you're right mate, good resources on real time shaders are quite rare on the Net. I publish time to time GLSL tutorials to cover gpu programming basis so if you code in glsl, try to post your questions here. I think the best way to learn gpu programming is to code, code and code again. Read as many books as you can (GPU Gems #1, #2 #3, Orange book, ShaderX series, Game Programming Gems) since these books offers very detailled articles and source codes and nice shaders written by masters. Then try to compile them, modify them, in a word hack them! Demoniak3D is a nice plateform to play with glsl shaders, so use it too!

Here are some links:

GLSL tutorials:
- oZone3D.Net GLSL articles: http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/
- Lighthouse3D GLSL articles: http://lighthouse3d.com/opengl/
- Humus - GLSL / HLSL: http://www.humus.ca

Programmable Shaders Forums:
- GLSL : http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards ... =11&page=1
- Cg: http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/inde ... owforum=14
- GPU programming: http://forum.beyond3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=22

ozone3d.net is where i asked, that helped me alot. orange book helps a lot to learn, and then techniques, come from asking, and basing it on real life. like lighting shaders look at real world and the advanced side of the computations and try simplify it using shaders and tricks, its tricky.

Let us know what else you find!

[FuzzYspo0N]

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore/dxshader1

theres lots around about understanding shaders, the problem is i dont know how to implment ideas.

[Virion]

thanks arras, for the links.

[Masterhawk]

thanks guys for this amount of links. It's quite hard to find them on the net by searching on your own.

so i think i'll order the orange-book to have some old-style tutorial. I guess in addition with these online-tuts this will be a good base to learn from.

Perhaps this thread should be moved to the FAQ or something

[killthesand]

I thought I'd throw out http://www.fundza.com/
It is primarily a source for learning Pixar's Renderman shaders. Most of the concepts are the same. For the beginner, the documents here provide a very good description of what a shader really does.

Of course a REYES/Raytrace renderer like Prman is very different from real time engines like DirectX or OpenGl so you won't be able to find any meaningful shader code here.