
ShaderFrog – Create and compose shaders in your browser - throughnothing
http://shaderfrog.com/home
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bhouston
This is a pretty cool project!

I especially like how easy it is to combine two shaders automatically into
one. Andrew Ray, the brilliant guy behind ShaderFrog, automatically parses the
shaders to intelligently merge them together -- something I've never seen
before.

Andrew has also created a run-time library to make it easy to adopt ShaderFrog
shaders into your own tools (sort of like how Allegorithmic has the Substance
run-time library for Unity and UE4). It is available here:

[https://github.com/DelvarWorld/ShaderFrog-
Runtime](https://github.com/DelvarWorld/ShaderFrog-Runtime)

We here at [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io), an online 3D modeling &
rendering platform, are exploring adopting the ShaderFrog material run-time.

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chii
it's pretty damn cool - i wish it is open-sourced.

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andrewray
This may be a silly question, but could you elaborate on why you prefer the
project to be open sourced? I'm keeping it closed source now for potential
business and security reasons.

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chii
I'm just curious and want to know how it works.

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andrewray
Hey folks! All this traffic has got our server a little excited. We're working
on restoring full service. Check @shaderfrog for updates
[https://twitter.com/shaderfrog/status/641645102960500738](https://twitter.com/shaderfrog/status/641645102960500738)

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tgb
Neat! See also shadertoy.com, though it's set up more for demoscene stuff.

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Tloewald
Looks very interesting, but seems like they're <do we have a verb for HN
traffic akin to slashdotting?>ed right now.

Looks like a tech demo right now. They need someone with taste to design a few
actually attractive/useful shaders.

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andrewray
All shaders are beautiful :)

This is a problem with user content submitted sites. It's hard not to conflate
the quality of the content (shaders) with the quality of the product
(ShaderFrog). There are no default ShaderFrog shaders, they're all user
created.

The more oddball shaders (my favorites) are the composed shaders, which are
_not_ eligible to be used as inputs to other composed shaders. Only the basic
shaders, which are generally higher quality because they require more
knowledge of how GLSL works, can be inputs to composed shaders.

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Tloewald
Right, but you do have a choice what's displayed on the landing page, and even
what default objects the user is given to play with. It pays to select them
well because ugly stuff can drive potential users away. You need to show
people who aren't technical that you can achieve nice effects and show them
how.

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phormat
Nice job Andy! This is by far the most intense thing I've seen my browser do.

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rl3
I tried ShaderFrog recently and was extremely impressed. The experience of
creating new shaders by composing individual existing shaders is incredible.

In my opinion, Andrew is just scratching the tip of the iceberg here. Hope he
keeps up the great work!

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mickanio
This is amazing! Bravo.

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curiousjorge
what is a shader exactly in layman's terms?

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ferbivore
Tiny program that runs on the GPU. Executes once for each point in the scene
(vertex shader) or pixel in the rendered image (pixel shader).

