Advanced Lab: Shaders

Catalog description

Learn how to creatively harness the power of your computer’s graphics card by writing your own shaders! Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU and are used for purposes most commonly related to graphic effects, video post-processing, and the generation of geometry. They are an incredibly powerful tool for creating hardware accelerated graphics and form the building blocks of the modern graphics pipeline. Vertex, fragment, and geometry shaders will be the main focus of the course. However, if time permits, compute shaders (GPGPU) will also be explored. The topic will be approached platform-agnostic, so that it can be applied to the different implementations in various software environments such as WebGL, Unity, Max, Touch Designer, etc. This an advanced-level 2-credit course; students are expected to have prior coding experience at the intermediate level in at least two programming languages.