I took some openGL in college, and can understand the most very basic shaders on Shadertoy, but the more advanced stuff that gets posted to Shadertoy is way over my head.
Is there a good set of resources (book, videos, website?) to learn the more advanced stuff? Sitting there and trying to understand the super complex (and even mediumly complex) shaders from scratch is just not doing it for me.
Most of the more complex shaders on shadertoy are raymarching signed distance fields. There are a good amount of resources covering this technique. A couple of recommendations:
One of the best ways to start understanding shader toy shaders is to modify or remove code and run it. This way you can visualize what functions in the shader contribute to the image, and in what ways. In some of the more complex shaders there can be almost random looking strings of math to generate a procedural texture or a specific post process effect, and breaking these down can help you gain an intuitive understanding of how to "paint with math".
I really like the idea of shadertoy. Learning to write shaders is some thing I really want to learn to do.. I just wish shadertoy was a desktop application because it doesn't run so well in my web browser.
Sorry for the question that might be a bit off-topic. Will we ever have support for sound fonts in a browser? E.g. piano sound fonts? With at least rudimentary support for MIDI (e.g. noteOn, noteOff)?
