michiel | 4 months ago | 10 comments | 10 likes | 315 views

Decentralized, Ulli, Sma and 7 others like this!

A pixel shader is a small app that runs on your graphics card that is called for every pixel. BluffTitler stores pixel shaders in its effect files. Here's why this is a VERY powerful technique.

In the top left you can see the AdvancedMaterials\UVMapper effect applied to a picture layer. The results in perfect circles!

In the top right you can see the same show exported as a 3D model in the GLB format. The GLB format does not support pixel shaders. It supports colour per vertex, so all it can do is interpolating the 3 colours of the 3 edges of the triangle. This turns the circles into triangles.

Instead of using colour per vertex you could use a texture. This turns the triangles back into circles! But when you zoom in, it becomes blurry (bottom right) because the resolution of the texture is limited. In contrast, the pixel shader version remains razor sharp, no matter how far you zoom in!

The screenshots have been made using this installer template:
Picture\Star3D.bt

This is how the Picture\Star3D.bt show looks like exported as GLB and published on Sketchfab.

Very nice! But not as nice as the pixel shader powered BluffTitler version 😉

michiel, 4 months ago

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