A lot of the styling looks very similar to some default choices popular llm's make; a default which I had never seen prior to their existence.

Also the ai-generated textures make it all the more likely that the rest of site is vibe-coded.

I'm not anti-ai per se, but using the defaults does affect my (and presumably others) impression of the quality of the site

Hey, I'm the co-creator of Shader Academy and wanted to thank you for referencing our platform - very helpful for us !

Also, for the people interested in providing feedback, ideas for improvements, what you'd like us to build next, etc - feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/VPP78kur7C

My journey into shaders started in Unity with Shader Graph and I eventually wound up using some much older ideas - Baked GI w/ the standard URP lit shader [0]. The built-in shaders already give you most of what an average gamer could ask for:

> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.

[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...

[1] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...

Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?

I'm under impression that if I want to make an actual game, it makes no sense to do any of this stuff myself because the many existing game engines do it much better and faster out of the box and all the possible style choices in graphics are abstracted away into parameters in the engine.

I can't get https://shaderacademy.com/challenge/intro_1 to work on Firefox 142.0b5. Even with the provided answer the output is just a red rectangle.

weirdly it claims my FF140 does not support webgl on Intel Mac with OSX15.7 which clearly supports Metal, and also supports webgl as per chronos website https://get.webgl.org/

The idea is amazing, congratulations on getting the product out! However, there's a lot about this site that doesn't sit well with me. The rather generic site design and uninspiring results of the challenges are something that I could probably overlook, but what irks me the most is the lack of any human aspect throughout the site. How does an academy completely gloss over the contributions of various amazing people who've been teaching shaders for years now and are responsible for making shaders accessible and fun? I would've never learnt what GLSL is, without ShaderToy. If someone started learning shaders through this site and never discovered the treasure trove of material on iquilezles' website, how do we expect them to jump straight into "Ray Marching"? I can't help but think that the site intentionally holds back information on various other phenomenal shader learning resources.

Existing works of art like iquilezles "Planet Fall" should be part of the recommended curriculum if only to inspire others and set the baseline for what's possible with shaders.

This looks cool!

Maybe it's because I'm on my phone and I don't see the full UI, but I'm having trouble navigating the tutorial section.

I don't need the "hello world" basic tutorials, I'm looking to jump in to a point that meets where I am with GLSL - is there a TOC or something for the tutorials?

Some sort of path or progression that you can jump around on?

This might not be entirely relevant since I'm not an expert in the 3d visual community but my friends launched this project and it might be something you'd be interested in

Shader Park https://share.google/FgjTgechf1J3n4l5X

I’ve been looking for something like this. The problem is, when to find the time to do it.

This is incredible, very well done.

Looks cool for rainy weekends.

@dang I think something might be going wrong with the automatic flagging in this thread. I’m seeing a few pretty normal comments that are all dead.

[dead]

Cool! I pasted some of the puzzles into ChatGPT and it solved them!