Shader Development from Scratch with Cg - Unity 6 Compatible (Udemy.com)

Pretty good introductory course if you know little about computer graphics and want to get into the subject. The course is pretty fun and interactive and with lots of emphasys on explanation, mostly up until the middle end parts of the course (advanced / volumetric shaders) where you'll be thrown tons of lines of code, math and numbers that magically become pretty things without much insight into what they do. So if you like courses carrying you step by step you'll probably get frustrated in these sections and just end up copying and pasting the code and watching the pretty effects. You'll still end up learning something valuable on each lesson.

It's a great course for me to understand how shaders work. It explains how the pixels are calculated, how the light can be involved into the calculation and using of dot function for it, How blending between different colours can be done together with alpha/transparent channel. Using of time function to get moving textures and even vertices for waves. In general speaking, i enjoyed very much and would like to see more details about how data or vectors are converted from vertex shader and passing to fragment shader. Especially from one space into another and changes are somehow related with last 2 components z and w. Volumetric rendering blown my mind :D. I liked to see how it works and would like to see it explained in step by step what happens at which step. I think that could already by a new course. Before watching it i would recommend to see Mathematics for Computer Games Development where you will get information about operating with vectors and after that you will enjoy that course even more. Thanks to Penny for creating such a good course!

I had tried another Shader course, and this guy went right to the difficult part. This shader course gives, in the very first lecture about the shader, a shader I already can use immediately! I do have a point of critique, though. It is very frustrating that I have to find all textures myself. They are not given into the resources. Since I am an absolute beginner in making shaders, I often haven't a clue where to find them. I know Penny de Byl recommends a website where one can find textures, but it interrupts the flow of learning to look up what, exactly, this website was, and then to find the textures I need. But apart from this, a very good course. I do not see a reason to reduce the number of stars because of this critique. In practice one has to figure this out for oneself anyways.

This course straightly gets to the work before structuring a good foundation on the underlying theory and the terms. For example, she never gets into the detail about what a sampler or sampling is, how the given functions process the input, etc. Too much additional research is required to really understand the topic that is taught here. update: I am updating my review after learning some valuable information and getting some inspiration about what is possible with the shaders. But still, especially Section 7, is full of just some chunk of "follow me and it will work" kind of information. This topic requires a more in-depth explanation of the underlying math and its practical uses. Still I respect the instructor's effort on trying to teach something that is really hard on this specific platform. This at least gave me some perspective on the topic. But I am not going to continue since I am learning nothing since the 6th section.

Exciting so far!

I wanted to get started with shaders and Graphics, this is the perfect course for doing so. Everything is well explained and there are enough excercises to practice the things learned!

The effects differ to much from the videos and the results one gets

This course really helped me understand a lot of things I wasn't able to figure out on my own. There were a lot of cool effects as examples and it was a lot of fun!
The volumetric portion of the course was kind of a slog though. There was a lot of information to digest all at once and things broke very easily.
I still would have given it 5 stars if not for the variable names. It seems silly but taking the extra time to give them descriptive names would have made it easier to understand what they were doing and it would have made it much easier to look back at the code later for examples. In some cases I had forgotten the purpose of certain things by the next lecture.
Besides that, more explanation for a few syntax related things like the macro's would have been pretty cool. I still don't really understand why they need "/" at the end.

I've been working in the video games industry for the last 2 and a half years, that means I already know a thing or two but still have a lot to learn... That being said, I think this course is great, now I'm far more confortable creating my own shaders.

I paused, tried on my own, and made the exact error you highlighted. Good job including that in the explanation.

A lot of useful information that I never got to learn when I was doing my own self study on shaders.

I always wanted to learn shader, but couldn't understand it because of the complexity behind it. Your videos make it very easy to understand and also cover any questions that pop up. By far one of the best tutorials I've ever had. 10/10 would make my bunny blue again