Shader guidance.

justinbarrett

I recently wrote a simple 4 shader terrain shader...nothing special..I practically copied it but added the black channel by subtracting the other mix channels and adding a detail texture by subtracting it by a small value.

The issue is I'm no shader guru..at all..I have no clue how to push a result to the NORMAL and compute the lighting...I do not know all the mix techniques also...like add, multiply etc..or if they need to be written.

Can anyone point me to a simple document that can tell me these things so I can work it out? I looked at the godot docs...they are less than helpful...clearly written by veteran programmers :)..so if you are new to anything..they are like figuring out ancient egyptian algebra...using hieroglyphs.

Megalomaniak

OpenGL/GLSL shader tutorials are what you want to look up. DirectX/HLSL knowledge won't hurt either.

https://learnopengl.com/Introduction

edit: Also looking up and reading through industry and academic white papers doesn't hurt either.

justinbarrett

Thanks, but while I was aiming to go for more realistic looking graphics...I was thinking I might be better off using the simplistic shader style I was using before with just a single palette texture and maybe a single sprite sheet for transparency...I'm no super impressed by the 3D performance in godot. It's not horrible..I just was thinking long and hard about it all evening yesterday and when I considered having all those different shaders and not having hard coded LOD or occlusion culling would really kill performance in a large open world..10k X 10k..

so I thank you, but I'm better off being simple "KISS". I'm really not a strong coder in general...I just seem to always "find a way"/workaround to get more complex things done.