Day 25: Unity Shaders - Rated CG-13

Unfortunately, as with all things that require an insane amount of non-Microsoft documentation and a fancier graphics card, DirectX 12 will have to wait. Although our laptops' feature levels do not support what DX12 has to offer, we can at least program for DX11 using DX12's interfaces.

That said, there's not much in the tutorials past the initialization. Unfortunately, Microsoft's "HelloWorld" samples are as obfuscated and filled with program specific headers and structures that differ from the actual DX12 library. It's rather counter-intuitive and makes it insanely difficult to even make a triangle. That said, when I finally have the chance to find more helpful resources, I will definitely dive in and take another look.

What next? The next prototype is coming up and Unity seems to be on everyone's minds for what to work with. As for me, there has been one specific thing that I have been quite uncomfortable with when working with Unity. Hell, I've worked with particle system collisions, predator-prey simulations, interpolating animation along a curve, and even cloth simulation. However, not much has actually prepared me to work with shaders. The shader language, Cg, is different but similar to what I've worked with in both GLSL and HLSL, with an option to default to OpenGL use. It's likely I'll be working with Cg though. So far, I've looked into setting up basic vertex and fragment shaders (OpenGL syntax!) and getting a basic color. Baby's first shader is below:

Not as exciting as you might think, but it allows me to look in depth to how shader programming works with material calculation and how to take a texture or vertices of an object and make something interesting of it. First, dull purple. Tomorrow? Flattening vertices? The next day? THE WORLD.