Shader Basics, Blending & Textures • Shaders for Game Devs [Part 1]
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a good first-steps shader tutorial that also teaches broad graphics knowledge.
What it is
The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends high_byte · 2021-09 · on “Visualize 3D hyperbolic honeycombs and sphere packings”
[LINK] and a good sandbox is [LINK] and you should consider unity too, this is a good tutorial but also lots of good info about graphics in general: [this video]
Recommends honkycat · 2022-02 · on “The harsh truth of video games programming”
For procedural animation: I have yet to find the path to learning this skill. It is very opaque, and I think you just need to attack it with your brain and learn it. For shader and graphics programming: I liked this tutorial series as a "first steps" by Freya Holmér: [this video] Here is another list: [LINK] The Book of Shaders is a popular suggestion, but it appears to be abandoned: [LINK] For general Unreal? Tom Looman's $300 Unreal C++ class, available on his website. It is pricey but really excellent. I also discovered this AWESOME list of learning paths for all gamedev concepts: [LINK]
Recommends FjordWarden · 2025-04 · on “Shadertoys Ported to Rust GPU”
I've always enjoyed watching The Art of Code[1], Freya[2] also has a good number of videos on it. But that is just vertex shaders for things like Shadertoys. There is much more to computer graphics or GPGPU than this though, Im still learning about that myself X). [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]