As someone who has always despised front-end programming, I would be more than satisfied if LLMs turned out to only be particularly good at that. Given the number of pages we've all seen where the content as well as the front-end are obviously 90% AI-generated, I understand the knee-jerk reaction against sites clearly designed by AI, but it's unfortunate that leads to a negative reaction against (or even just a difficulty distinguishing) sites where people share a tool/knowledge of their own that they never would have shared if it would have taken even just a few days of futzing around with CSS/figuring out the latest JS framework...
I think people under-estimate how much of an effect the unreasonable complexity of modern front-end programming has had, especially outside of tech. My wife works in the non-profit world and I have been completely blown away by how much "designers" barely able to tweak a wordpress plugin get away with charging... She's an "AI skeptic" herself, but almost cried with joy when I showed her V0 [0].
[0] Not as good at coding as others, but probably the single most impressive AI product I've played with from a UX perspective.
Hey, I'm the co-creator of Shader Academy and wanted to thank you for referencing our platform - very helpful for us !
Also, for the people interested in providing feedback, ideas for improvements, what you'd like us to build next, etc - feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/VPP78kur7C
I am also other author of shader academy. To clarify comments about ai, we use it sometimes to add comments in a code (people needed it to solve problems) or sometimes to generate some boilerplate code.
My journey into shaders started in Unity with Shader Graph and I eventually wound up using some much older ideas - Baked GI w/ the standard URP lit shader [0]. The built-in shaders already give you most of what an average gamer could ask for:
> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.
Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?
I'm under impression that if I want to make an actual game, it makes no sense to do any of this stuff myself because the many existing game engines do it much better and faster out of the box and all the possible style choices in graphics are abstracted away into parameters in the engine.
>Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?
Learning something new is always worthwhile, even if you have no immediate practical usecase for that knowledge.
Also, neither Unity or Unreal are a drop in replacement for shader programming. If you want to do anything advanced you'll need to get your hands dirty rolling your own GLSL/HLSL.
That's a good point, but I think very often people still have hard time creating effects they want. For example good few years ago I published few shaders on Unity Asset Store (like https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fragmentat...) and there were quite a lot of purchases (and still are sometimes).
My point is, you can create more complex effects and provide them as a tool/out of the box effect (wrapper)
If your goal is to just make a game, then sure, there’s probably not a huge gain in learning low-level graphics.
But the reason existing game engines already do it better is because well… there’s still people out there who learn low-level graphics and maintain / improve those engines. Right?
Even simplest (in terms of graphics) 2D games like Balatro have custom shaders today. It's an extremely valuable, and commonly applied skill set among game devs.
> game engines... all the possible style choices
Nah. Nope. Never happens.
Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL.
Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.
Shaders are not some hidden rendering pipeline technicality you can abstract away and forget about. Even if you don't write raw shader code you still need to use something like a shader graph for most games, or you will be very limited.
weirdly it claims my FF140 does not support webgl on Intel Mac with OSX15.7 which clearly supports Metal, and also supports webgl as per chronos website https://get.webgl.org/
The idea is amazing, congratulations on getting the product out! However, there's a lot about this site that doesn't sit well with me. The rather generic site design and uninspiring results of the challenges are something that I could probably overlook, but what irks me the most is the lack of any human aspect throughout the site. How does an academy completely gloss over the contributions of various amazing people who've been teaching shaders for years now and are responsible for making shaders accessible and fun? I would've never learnt what GLSL is, without ShaderToy. If someone started learning shaders through this site and never discovered the treasure trove of material on iquilezles' website, how do we expect them to jump straight into "Ray Marching"? I can't help but think that the site intentionally holds back information on various other phenomenal shader learning resources.
Existing works of art like iquilezles "Planet Fall" should be part of the recommended curriculum if only to inspire others and set the baseline for what's possible with shaders.
This might not be entirely relevant since I'm not an expert in the 3d visual community but my friends launched this project and it might be something you'd be interested in
Thank you, and now I have a new pattern to watch out for in URLs. After all the energy we just had to go through to rescue all the goo.gl links when Big Evil decided that hosting a redirect webserver was too much trouble for them, and here we go again with share.google - crazypants
Readit News
Also the ai-generated textures make it all the more likely that the rest of site is vibe-coded.
I'm not anti-ai per se, but using the defaults does affect my (and presumably others) impression of the quality of the site
Deleted Comment
I think people under-estimate how much of an effect the unreasonable complexity of modern front-end programming has had, especially outside of tech. My wife works in the non-profit world and I have been completely blown away by how much "designers" barely able to tweak a wordpress plugin get away with charging... She's an "AI skeptic" herself, but almost cried with joy when I showed her V0 [0].
[0] Not as good at coding as others, but probably the single most impressive AI product I've played with from a UX perspective.
Also, for the people interested in providing feedback, ideas for improvements, what you'd like us to build next, etc - feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/VPP78kur7C
> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.
[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...
[1] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...
I'm under impression that if I want to make an actual game, it makes no sense to do any of this stuff myself because the many existing game engines do it much better and faster out of the box and all the possible style choices in graphics are abstracted away into parameters in the engine.
Learning something new is always worthwhile, even if you have no immediate practical usecase for that knowledge.
Also, neither Unity or Unreal are a drop in replacement for shader programming. If you want to do anything advanced you'll need to get your hands dirty rolling your own GLSL/HLSL.
My point is, you can create more complex effects and provide them as a tool/out of the box effect (wrapper)
But the reason existing game engines already do it better is because well… there’s still people out there who learn low-level graphics and maintain / improve those engines. Right?
But this is more than just games. Shaders are how you program a GPU. There are plenty of use cases.
> game engines... all the possible style choices
Nah. Nope. Never happens.
Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL.
Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.
Existing works of art like iquilezles "Planet Fall" should be part of the recommended curriculum if only to inspire others and set the baseline for what's possible with shaders.
Do you think we should put these inspirations more on homepage?
Shader Park https://share.google/FgjTgechf1J3n4l5X