The Book of Shaders — ISF/VDMX translation

Wednesday, June 24th, 2015 | Blog, Downloads

VDMX

I love doing live visualizations, but have only dipped my toes into what may be considered something like real-time visualization. Having done a little bit of programming in some motion graphics software, it seemed like a natural fit to try and have a go at GLSL — The language of the graphics card. Unfortunately, the level of difficulty is extremely ramped up from using an artist friendly environment like Processing. I pretty much gave up, but much like my The Nature of Code translation project, I found an artist-friendly book in Patricio Gonzalez Vivo’s The Book of Shaders. Similar to my other translation project, I implemented it in a motion graphics environment I was already familiar with – namely, VidVox’s excellent VDMX, using their new-ishly implemented interactive shader format. If you have VDMX, or a host app for ISF files, or want to dip your toes into the fragment shader waters, this is about as painless and fun as it can get. 

It seems to me Patricio is incomplete with his work on his Book of Shaders. Hopefully this encourages him to keep pushing forward!

Download the .fs and VDMX files