New tutorial: Fun with Text and Shaders

edited November 2015 in Projects - Tools
Hi everyone,

I've just completed a tutorial on using text and shaders. All feedback is welcome and appreciated :)

Comments

  • jimjim
    edited November 2015
    Nice job :) Very easy to follow, couldn't get much easier than this. I guess the last part could be done with sprites too :D 2D lighting in orx ;)
  • edited November 2015
    jim wrote:
    I guess the last part could be done with sprites too :D
    Do you mean the interactive demo by saying "the last part"? If so, how would you do that with sprites? :)
  • jimjim
    edited November 2015
    I mean using normal map and light to illuminate sprites. But sure this process looks heavy to do it for all sprites. One way to fake lighting is how its done here https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=M0azBY4ourk

    First part (actually whole article) of the article has explanation. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/OliverFranzke/20140828/224326/Dynamic_2D_Character_Lighting.php
  • edited November 2015
    Brilliant article! I did fonts the other night by hand the long way and regretted it. And I can finally follow something on shading! I need to learn these.
  • edited November 2015
    Very nice tutorial, congrats!

    Mandatory nitpicking comment: when you say
    It's a 24 bit RGBA image that just conveys the information of a 1bit image!

    I think you might instead want either:
    It's a 24 bit RGB image that just conveys the information of a 1bit image!

    Or:
    It's a 32 bit RGBA image that just conveys the information of a 8bit image!
  • edited November 2015
    sausage wrote:
    Brilliant article! I did fonts the other night by hand the long way and regretted it. And I can finally follow something on shading! I need to learn these.

    Mhh, I guess the tutorials I wrote that contained shaders (spawner and lighting) didn't help much on the shader side?
  • edited November 2015
    jim wrote:
    I mean using normal map and light to illuminate sprites.
    Ah, sorry, now I get it, I misunderstood your previous comment completely the other way round. I thought you meant, "the same effect can be achieved using sprites". Of course, you can do the same with them :) Thanks for the link.

    sausage wrote:
    Brilliant article! ... I need to learn these
    Thanks sausage :) You do great stuff with Orx, I hope the tutorial helps you make them even greater :) If you give it a try, you know I can give online assistance on gitter.

    iarwain wrote:
    Mandatory nitpicking comment:
    Thanks, your nitpickery has been greatly appreciated :)
    I guess the tutorials I wrote that contained shaders (spawner and lighting) didn't help much on the shader side?
    I think those tutorials are great, conveying so much information, but one of the reasons I wrote this tutorial is that they might be a bit scary for someone who'd just want to tip his toe into shaders. Your tutorials contain a considerable amount of text and non-shader code before introducing the shaders. I just wanted to write a tutorial that focuses on shaders, trying to illustrate how Orx makes working with shaders extremely simple, and that the idea of a shader is very simple too.
  • edited November 2015
    BTW, do you think I should add this tutorial under multiple sections in the tutorials page?
  • edited November 2015
    enobayram wrote:
    I guess the tutorials I wrote that contained shaders (spawner and lighting) didn't help much on the shader side?
    I think those tutorials are great, conveying so much information, but one of the reasons I wrote this tutorial is that they might be a bit scary for someone who'd just want to tip his toe into shaders. Your tutorials contain a considerable amount of text and non-shader code before introducing the shaders. I just wanted to write a tutorial that focuses on shaders, trying to illustrate how Orx makes working with shaders extremely simple, and that the idea of a shader is very simple too.

    I see your point, though the C-side introduction of the shader part (handling the event) is almost at the beginning of the lighting tutorial. Maybe it should have been reversed?
  • edited November 2015
    iarwain wrote:
    sausage wrote:
    Brilliant article! I did fonts the other night by hand the long way and regretted it. And I can finally follow something on shading! I need to learn these.

    Mhh, I guess the tutorials I wrote that contained shaders (spawner and lighting) didn't help much on the shader side?

    Yes those other tutorials have been a little intimidating. The official one covers spawners, multiple config files, alpha/mixing, and towards the end, shaders.

    The real difficulty for me was understanding what a shader actually was. I think of old school concepts when I hear the word "shader" like: gouraud shading or whatever.

    When you find out the sorts of things a shader can actually do: things like water effects and all kinds of crazy things, the term shader becomes a confusing one.

    Then you're confronted with a big tutorial and it's all too just too much :)
  • edited November 2015
    But in addition.. this is what we're all about lately, breaking things down, making them more understandable and more digestible, so it's all good.
  • edited November 2015
    I guess I should have mentioned the spawner one but only the lighting one which is only about shader:
    Lighting tutorial
    Summary

    This is tutorial shows how to use shaders for lighting with auto-generated normal maps.
  • edited November 2015
    As a side note, the "modern" notion of shaders has been introduced in... 1988. ;)
  • edited November 2015
    iarwain wrote:
    As a side note, the "modern" notion of shaders has been introduced in... 1988. ;)

    Like on the Amiga? That's where I first saw demos doing stuff like gouraud shading. I was never sure if those shaders had any relationship to these shaders today.

    But you asked about the lighting tutorial. It's pretty comprehensive. I'd personally start by dipping my toes with enobayram's text one, and once comfortable, move to the lighting one.
  • edited November 2015
    Shading models (not shaders) are from the early 70s, but the shaders (as microcode executed for rendering purposes) was introduced by Pixar with Renderman in 1988.
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