What is inside the free samples for our books? Here’s a quick look at the one included in The Godot Shaders Bible.
If you’re getting into shaders in Godot,
The Godot Shaders Bible is a solid place to start. It explains the basics without assuming prior experience, then
slowly builds into more advanced topics.
You can learn things like:
- How Godot’s shader language works
- How meshes, materials, and shaders connect
- Different lighting models and rendering techniques
- Procedural shapes, shader math, and vertex animation
- Post-processing effects, screen-space VFX, and ray marching
The free sample gives a small look at some of these concepts, while the full book goes much deeper into them.
For example, one of the things the sample explains is what a shader actually does inside Godot.
In simple terms, shaders are small programs that run on the GPU and control how objects are drawn on screen, using things like position, color, textures, and lighting data.
(Godot shader structure with vertex() and fragment(), p. 35)
In Godot, shader files are usually split into two main parts: the vertex() function, which changes the geometry before it gets rendered, and the fragment() function, which controls how the final surface looks on screen.
Before the final image appears on screen, the mesh data goes through multiple stages inside the render pipeline, where things like vertices, UVs, normals, lighting, and screen space transformations are processed step by step. The vertex() and the fragment() functions are some of the most important parts of this pipeline.
(Render Pipeline stages inside Godot, p. 36)
If you want to learn more, the book goes deeper into this. If you don’t feel sure yet about it,
the free sample gives you an idea of how it is.