Shader Toy Is a New Tool for Making Better Graphics

Have you ever noticed that some video games display dramatic sunsets that look like the proverbial vanilla skies of Monet paintings? Rockstar Games did this in 2006 when it released its controversial and legendary Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game which treated players to pastel and neon sunsets over a fictional version of Miami. Then came Fallout, Skyrim, and Red Dead Revolver, three major titles that really showed off with regard to sunsets.

The digital graphic effect that makes these sunsets possible is called pixel shaders. In essence, shaders are code snippets that account for every pixel on display, and they can be programmed to be very dynamic.

A simple shader will only display the pixels in certain situations. One example is the lighting of a sky, which should be either a white light or a shadow, the latter of which will look like a shadow but with its shadow drawn in. Another example is how a shadow should look like on a landscape, where most shadow pixels should be black. So how do you create your own sunset lighting? Simply make up your own shader, and then draw that on to the pixel-packed backdrop. This would represent a large amount of coding to

create your own sunset lighting effect, which is why game developers resort to libraries.

If you think about it, pixel shaders work in a way similar to color gradients; in fact, when you code a custom fragment shader, you are practically configuring a gradient. The Three.JS development framework allows you to implement Shader Material libraries for web projects, which means that you can create everything from a sunset to a psychedelic screensaver effect as the background to your web pages.

To get your feet wet with animated gradients and pixel shader effects for the web, your first step should be to get acquainted with Shader Toy. Once you have played around a bit with this neat design tool, you will be able to inspect the source code and figure out how it would feet in your Three.JS project. You could achieve a similar result with CSS and scalable vector graphics, but doing so would require quite a bit more coding. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdesign/comments/n322y8/anyoneknowhowtoreplicatethisgradienteffect/.