Intro to 3D shader programming with GLSL and ray marching

I gave this talk (in German) at my home hackerspace Stratum 0. It’s a gentle introduction to creating 3D graphics using fragment shaders written in the OpenGL Shading Language, which allow an unusual approach to creating graphics: Geometry is modelled as a distance function, which describes the distance to the nearest surface, and we can use a technique called ray marching to render the scene.

You can find the GLSL source code of the demonstrated shaders on GitHub.

To run them, you can use glslviewer (on your command line) or this online editor (in your browser).

Shadertoy contains a plethora of cool examples, and The Book of Shaders is a brilliant interactive step-by-step guide to fragment shaders.

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