szpro (u/szpro) - Readit News

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

crashprone · 2 days ago

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.

szpro · 2 days ago

Hey, so if you go to for example https://shaderacademy.com/challenge/raymarching_3 and open Learning section and scroll through there. We literally link these great resources you mentioned. Also, we literally have discord with resources where we link a lot of them https://discord.com/channels/1358424822551674880/13584277359...

Do you think we should put these inspirations more on homepage?

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

raincole · 2 days ago

Personally I know it's about edge detection at the first glance. But I think you should have two things:

1) Make it clear that the lack of instructions is intentional

2) Have a "pixel inspection" tool so we can check the exact RGB values in the expected and diff images more easily.

szpro · 2 days ago

Thanks a lot, I think this is valid feedback and we will do that. About 1) we made assumption that for ranked challenges it would be obvious why it is vague, but we can fix it.

Thank you!

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

raincole · 3 days ago

I've found it ridiculous that people can see this insanely useful, free resource and their first reactions are "meh the buttons are default AI style."

szpro · 2 days ago

thank you for your comment! I hope you enjoy our platform!

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

danielvaughn · 3 days ago

This is incredible, very well done.

szpro · 2 days ago

thank you!

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

E-Reverance · 3 days ago

Never mind, you were right that it is edge detection (a terrible one though lol):

https://shaderacademy.com/shaders/glsl/ranked_1/fragmentExpe...

But I still stand by the ai-gen'd aspect

szpro · 3 days ago

Hey, so I responded about it in other thread, but let me respond here.

Most challenges were created by us, but we use LLM for example to generate comments in the code or generate some simple boiler plate.

Sometimes, it is also useful to create similar challenge to already existing one.

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

yorwba · 3 days ago

The title is "Vector of Change" and the description is "Your challenge is to make something as close as the expected shader." and that's all the context you get. It doesn't seem like a very well-designed exercise.

szpro · 3 days ago

Hey, thanks for sharing this feedback. I am one of the creators of shader academy and I created this challenge. This is ranked challenge, so we do not provide answer and the score of it is used in our ranking https://shaderacademy.com/ranking For now we do not have other ranked challenges, but we will add more in future.

How would you improve description of this challenge? As you can notice, we provide a lot of hints, description etc. for other challenges, but this one is vague on purpose.

Thank you

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

vjk800 · 3 days ago

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.

szpro · 3 days ago

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)

szpro commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

ahmkool · 3 days ago

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

szpro · 3 days ago

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.