I always thought the point of shaders was to make 3D models look fancy. You can either run code on each vertex, or do crazy things on each pixel. It’s how some of the fancy effects we see on modern desktop GUIs are done – the window is a flat 2D object textured with the image of the program.
And then graphics cards became fast enough that we could do a form of raytracing on each pixel to make an image. It’s really strange, but quite cool.
Useful Code
Some of these were taken from Art of Code YouTube videos
Smooth min
This is used to merge two shapes together in the shader
float smin(float a, float b, float k)
{
float h = clamp(.5+.5*(b-a)/k, 0., 1.);
return mix(b,a,h) - k*h*(1.0-h);
}
