About An introduction to shaders

I've previously given youan introduction to Three.js. If you've not read that you might want to as it's the foundation on which I will be building during this article. What I want to do is discuss shaders. WebGL is brilliant, and as I've said before Three.js (and other libraries) do a fantastic job of abstracting away the difficulties for you. But there will be times you want to achieve a specific effect, or you will want to dig a little deeper into how that amazing stuff appeared on your screen, and shaders will almost certainly be a part of that equation. Also if you're like me you may well want to go from the basic stuff in the last tutorial to something a little more tricky. I'll work on the basis that you're using Three.js, since it does a lot of the donkey work for us in terms of getting the shader going. I'll say up front as well that at the start I will be explaining the context for shaders, and that the latter part of this tutorial is where we will get into slightly more advanced territory. The reason for this is that shaders are unusual at first sight and take a bit of explaining.