Shader tutorials?

[Adam Ferestad]

I am looking to write some procedural shaders for a project I am working on in school, and I am looking for a good place to start.  I haven't written shaders before, but I understand the basic concepts.  Can anyone point me in the direction of some articles or tutorials that are more current?  I have tried to find some online and haven't gotten much.  I have viewed the Masterclass for shaders on SideFX, but didn't get much new information out of it.

[f1480187]

I believe there is no tutorials exist on PBR-era shader writing. $HH/vex/Surface contains many examples, starting from very simple. VOPs tied with VEX closely, so, it is useful to look at generated VEX code. I would prefer VOP + snippets workflow, instead of typing raw code into a custom Surface operator, for convenience.

[carlo_c]

There is this, not sure if it's what you have in mind though - http://www.rohandalvi.net/shader/

[Adam Ferestad]

Thanks guys.  Sorry it took me so long to get back to this topic.  I have been working on finishing another project, and now I am diving head long into this one.

On 5/6/2016 at 11:17 PM, carlo_c said:

There is this, not sure if it's what you have in mind though - http://www.rohandalvi.net/shader/

That would be something I would be interested in, if I weren't a starving grad student.  I will have to look at them after I get out and get a good source of income.

 

On 5/5/2016 at 11:25 PM, f1480187 said:

I believe there is no tutorials exist on PBR-era shader writing. $HH/vex/Surface contains many examples, starting from very simple. VOPs tied with VEX closely, so, it is useful to look at generated VEX code. I would prefer VOP + snippets workflow, instead of typing raw code into a custom Surface operator, for convenience.

Thanks for the advice, I will be doing this now.  Hopefully I can figure out how to get them working right.

[f1480187]

I saw several coding-related topics from you and thought you are after written shaders specifically. If you seek info about general shader building, don't bother with VEX examples, and just analyze standard shader's created with VOPs, like Principled Shader. Rohan Dalvi's tutorials are great also, and there is more than one official video about shader building on SESI website.

[Adam Ferestad]

Thanks f... that was what I was looking for for the most part.  I have been playing with a few things today and I have been going through the basic shaders and rebuilding them from scratch in a material builder node, just to get my feet wet.  I am actually about post another thread asking a specific question with something I ran into.

[acey195]

13 hours ago, f1480187 said:

I saw several coding-related topics from you and thought you are after written shaders specifically. If you seek info about general shader building, don't bother with VEX examples, and just analyze standard shader's created with VOPs, like Principled Shader. Rohan Dalvi's tutorials are great also, and there is more than one official video about shader building on SESI website.

VEX advocate here

It really matters how complex your shader needs to be, if it has a lot of nodes and especially if it has looping structures (with more than 3 nodes inside), I personally would go with VEX snippets every time
which is basically the best of both worlds as you can combine them with VOPS like other VOPS.

But yeah for starters, for just loading textures on top of UVs and simple gradients, go with normal VOPS first.