Recently I have been doing a lot of work with shaders. If you are unfamiliar, shaders are little programs that typically run on computer and console graphics processing units. They tell the GPU how to draw pixels to the screen.
I think most artists don’t want anything to do with shaders. They are technical, the programming languages used to write them are a little arcane, and they don’t really offer the instant feedback of making a mark on paper. I think a lot of artists find creating or working with shaders sort of antithetical to making art. I know this, because they have told me as much.
I sort of love it.
I don’t know if I am actually that great at working on shaders. I have to consult cheat sheets for a lot of the basic functions like matrix rotation transforms because I don’t have those committed to memory. It sometimes takes me a minute to visualize some of the vector math. But still, I sort of love it.
I think of it like this. In the realm of digital art, especially realtime 3D game art, knowing how shaders work is sort of like making your own paint. You certainly don’t have to mix and prepare your own paint to lay color down on a canvas, but if you do know how paint is made, you are going to know how each pigment will blend, how the medium with flow. You won’t just be painting. You will know how paint works.
There is a huge incentive to specialize when working on commercial games. Stay in your lane. Only focus on your part of the assembly line. For an artist, that might mean only creating textures or only building models, with no concern for the people before or after you on that assembly line. You do your job and they do theirs. That’s fine I suppose, if you have an assembly line.
When you don’t have people before and after you on the line, when you are the line, it becomes very important that you understand how your medium works. My medium is digital graphics. Part of that medium is programming shaders to run on GPUs. Even if it’s not my specialty or I’m not the greatest at it, I think it makes me better at the rest of my work to understand how shaders work. A big part of that is making them. And I sort of love it.