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by gfxgirl
1946 days ago
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Shadertoy is the absolute worst way to learn graphics. It's a puzzle designed for experts to show they can pass the puzzle. Production graphics almost never use those techniques. Production graphics don't limit themselves to fragment shaders and 1 draw call and no vertices. Production graphics run at 60 fps full screen where as shadertoy graphics almost never run at 60fps even in their tiny display. Shadertoy can be fun and you can learn lots of techniques and lots of math but you aren't learning graphics |
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Usually I teach the OpenGL pipeline in one session, but students have a lot of things to understand: Vertex shader has its own things to learn and without the fragment shader you do not see what you are doing. In the following lessons I dig into the details of each part independently. This approach works, but it requires a lot of abstraction from the beginnings and a lot of code to have trivial applications. Furthermore, it introduce latency in understanding the whole pipeline, they do not really 'get' why we have this pipeline and what each bloc does inside of it. Only after a few lessons, when they have all the pieces, everything clicks.
This year I tried another approach: I used at the first lesson exclusively ShaderToys with progressive exercices, the students were very happy to be able to create content directly and eagerly digged into the details by themselves. Naturally, as wanted, they felt the issue of not being able to create simple objects like a 3D cube and move in 3D.
The second lesson was then the perfect time to show the whole pipeline and the vertex shader was an almost obvious need!
Another change I made this year was switching from C++ to Javascript, I'm not yet sure which solution is the best. They both have advantages and drawbacks to learn OpenGL/WebGL.