Question about shaders

angryMonkey

I'm really new to 3D Art, but am planning on a career as a game environment artist. So is learning shader languages worth the time? My summer break is coming up and I was thinking that I would spend my time learning a shader language if it would be a great benefit. Any opinions on which language to learn, and where this is most applicable?

Thanks for any feedback. :poly136:

I'll do some research and follow up to help anyone else that has this question.

JordanN

Technically, all the materials found in UE4 and similar game engines are shaders. So if you learn all about nodes and how to construct networks with them, you can achieve almost anything with them.

If you mean learning the raw language of DirectX/OpenGL, I think it depends. I imagine that falls more into the programmer/technical artist side than it does for environment art.

Justin Meisse

Yeah, more of a tech artist thing. If you're interested in learning it, it can't hurt. If you find it painful drudgery that makes you hate life then don't worry about it, it's not a requirement.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

If you're interested then fuck yeah, learn shaders. They are rad ass and you can do some really amazing stuff with them.

There's some maths involved if you want to get good at them, and especially you can do amazing stuff if you understand vectors and a bit of geometry (sin cos tan). UE4 is a great place to start learning the basic concepts -- there's loads of cool examples in the sample projects for you to start picking apart.

Once you've learned materials in UE4, translating that into CG/HLSL I found to be much easier than learning CG from the get go. Typing out shaders is approaching tech artist territory, which is a great gig if you can do it, but also means you'll generally not be working on art-art anymore.

marks

Kurt Russell Fan Club wrote: »

Typing out shaders is approaching tech artist territory, which is a great gig if you can do it, but also means you'll generally not be working on art-art anymore.

It really isn't, lol

Brian "Panda" Choi

@marks: dang man, that was deflating, hahaha

NegevPro

marks wrote: »

It really isn't, lol

Care to expand on that? I've been learning how to write shaders for the past few months and it has been a ton of fun but I don't know much about what a professional technical artist does. From what I've researched it seems like the position itself varies from studio to studio so some tech artists might not even spend their time making shaders.

iadagraca

Main reason I want to learn is for a decent ramp/toon shader for my models. I can't find any that work so I'm left to do it myself or figure out how to fix other ones.

The only one I've used that I like is built into blender but then that has its other issues like alpha sorting -_-.

angryMonkey

Thanks for all the feedback guys.

@JordanN I've seen some work by people that used UE4 in their rendering. I'll definitely have to work with it. Thanks for the heads up!

@Kurt Russell Fan Club As I said to JordanN I'll definitely work with UE4. I want to work with art and direct creation of environments and levels, so I'll probably just use the knowledge of shaders for fun. It might help my resume too I suppose. Thanks for sharing the advice.

Eric Chadwick

We have some resources here that might help.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Shaders#Creating_Shaders

angryMonkey

Thanks @Eric Chadwick I'll check these out!

d1ver

Some good replies here. Writing code manually is not a necessity. But if you ever feel like you want to do it there definitely are magical worlds out there that are outside the usual environment artist path.

Also shameless plug but consider this:
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK7kTLoGU18&list=PLbPC2AiSSX7_TSiVxlqKon_LL2Rr1z_3P[/ame]

and this:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNwMJeWFr0U&list=PLsycjeNP6l26RL1JYz_3aUXEVKSt1X5TZ[/ame]

as pretty deep comprehensive overviews of how modern shaders work.

cheers

angryMonkey

Wow! Thanks so much for those. They were very informative, and thanks for making them! I'll keep up with these and the other resources shared in this thread. I shall mastah the shada. lol