[1.12.2] Shaders

[DavidM]

I was experimenting with rendering, and would like to explore more in the field of shaders.

My questions are:

1. What exactly are shaders?
2. How do shaders work?
3. How to use shaders?

 

Alternatively, are there any resources I can read to get a better understanding of how to use shaders?

[V0idWa1k3r]

1 hour ago, DavidM said:

• What exactly are shaders?

A shader is a program that executes on your GPU. It gets some data as an input and it outputs some data. That's all there is to them.

 

1 hour ago, DavidM said:

•  How do shaders work?

When opengl renders stuff it goes through various passes, during which it may interact with the currently active shader program. An interaction in this case would be opengl passing some data to the program and collecting the results.

 

1 hour ago, DavidM said:

How to use shaders?

Write one, bind it before rendering and you are done.

 

Of course shaders are fairly complex and difficult to discribe like that. There are many resources online that introduce you to shaders. Just keep in mind that minecraft isn't exactly shader friendly, as in it's rendering engine is a huge mess of pre 3.0 and post 3.0 GL code.

 

1 hour ago, DavidM said:

Alternatively, are there any resources I can read to get a better understanding of how to use shaders?

https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Shaders is a good one I am personally aware of, but apart from that just google "opengl shaders tutorial" and I am sure you can find a lot of information out there.