How do I create custom shaders?

Question

I have some basic shader code going for rendering a simple 2D shape, but how would I go about tweaking and building on the code to make my own custom object, say a piece of wood?

z32486 · Accepted Answer

That's a very interesting question... The best answer I can give is that you should buy a book. Programming shaders from scratch requires a certain level of math knowledge which I know nothing of your background. (Linear algebra mostly). I recommend a book because, well, your question is a broad question, and a book is about the quickest/best answer a person could give. I learned from this book: http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-Shading-Language-3rd-Edition/dp/0321637631 which by the way is still completely relevant, But there is probably something newer out there like http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-4-0-Shading-Language-Cookbook/dp/1849514763/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z

I guess though, to answer your question, you're going to want to look into creating a bump map fragment shader which uses textures from the gl environment. Oh and, one more thing... usually there is multiple ways to accomplish a task in graphics because graphics are a hack to fool the user, there is no limit except your imagination.

Good luck to you, shaders are a lot of fun and represent the pinnacle of graphics :)

OK, im back again, I just remember that you can also grab a copy of RenderMonkey

http://developer.amd.com/resources/archive/archived-tools/gpu-tools-archive/rendermonkey-toolsuite/

This will help you create shaders outside of your programming environment and it also has code examples you can rip of learn from or both. I think that's all for now.

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How do I create custom shaders?

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