Where Math and Art Meet

What the talk is about

Dmitry Baidachnyi explains in plain terms, for artists and anyone new to shaders, what they are and where to start. Shaders are small programs running on the GPU: vertex shaders process model points, fragment (pixel) shaders handle the colour of each pixel. His core idea is that a texture is just a table of numbers and UVs are coordinates into it, so scrolling, stretching, gradients and Photoshop-style blend modes are ordinary maths. Examples include dissolve effects and melting snow driven by an alpha mask, gradient mapping to recolour one texture, and a rotating globe made from a single quad of two triangles. Simple custom shaders save memory and disk space, but complex ones on many pixels hurt performance. Useful for artists, technical artists and beginners in graphics.