Unity Hackweek 2019:

This week I was lucky enough to be invited to Unity Hackweek in Copenhagen. It was the first Hackweek I have ever participated in so I was unsure what I wanted to work on. I did know however, that I wanted to work on shaders, and making them easier to use for those that don't know anything about them. When I started learning shaders about a year and a half ago there were a lot of concepts that I had trouble grasping. Some low level graphics concepts and some math concepts seemed very confusing to me, even though I am fairly technical. It made me realize that for someone with only art knowledge understanding shaders, which is really all about visuals, is incredibly overwhelming. From that idea I came up witht the concept of giving artists a way to make shaders and shaders features with a tool that uses language they understand. I wanted to make sure to translate how some concepts effect a shader so that artists can see how the underlying math concepts make the visuals of the shader change. In this video I talk through the proof of concept for that tool, it's definitely a little rough around the edges since this is only about a day and a half of work (I spent a lot of time in the week researching and pursuing other methods to get to this method), so bear with me. I do think it's an impressive concept and something that I could build upon to make more comprehensive shaders and have them generated for the artist.