Show HN: Shadergarden: Create reloadable graphical pipelines with Lisp and GLSL

blog.tonari.no

47 points·slightknack··2 comments

Hey HN,

Isaac Clayton again[0]! This summer I worked as an intern at tonari[1] where I developed algorithms for real-time 3D scene construction on the GPU. As a part of my research, I developed a library / tool for prototyping shader-based graphical pipelines on the GPU. This tool, Shadergarden[2], uses GLSL[3] for shaders, but introduces a lisp-like configuration language[4] for chaining shaders (and other transformations) into directed acyclic graphical pipelines. We've been using it for both art and research, kinda like a local Shadertoy.

Hope you enjoy the write up, have a nice day!

PS — If your browser automatically pauses videos, you might need to 'show video controls' to play some of the visualizations.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347140 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212491

[1]: https://tonari.no

[2]: https://github.com/tonarino/shadergarden

[3]: https://thebookofshaders.com/

[4]: https://github.com/tonarino/shadergarden/blob/master/LISP.md (When all you have is a compiler, everything's a DSL)

Lovely work. I am always intrigued by the power of shaders. For scientific visualization, the typical paths for data presentation are very utilitarian, and we never progress very far from that. No time, I suppose.. but the tools should encourage more satisfying results; mostly science is communication.

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