Lighting, Rendering & ShadersEdit

3D lighting, rendering theory, shader theory, and renderer-specific learning. Render engine software lives in §12.

3D Lighting: Fundamentals

Core lighting tutorials for beginners and generalists.

• 10 Tips for Better Lighting. Helloluxx lighting tips.
• Creative Shrimp. High quality CG tutorials and Blender tutorials, digital art and lighting tutorials with Gleb and Aidy.
• Get Better Lighting in C4D. Improve C4D lighting.
• School of Motion Lighting Blog. Shadows, volumetrics, HDRI, and area light techniques.
• The Digital Revolution. Beginner C4D lighting.

3D Lighting: Redshift-Specific

Redshift lighting tutorials, primarily in C4D.

• Creative Product Lighting with Redshift & C4D. Jarred van de Voort, NAB 2023.
• How to Art Direct Lights in a Cloner. Art-directing lights across cloners.
• Redshift Interior Materials & Lighting. Interior materials and lighting.
• Redshift Lighting Techniques (Essential MoGraph). Redshift lighting techniques.
• You And Me Academy. Light groups workflow.

3D Lighting: Production

Production-focused lighting talks.

Related:

• CNDL Freemium. An IES lighting creation toolset. Improve your renders with custom IES lighting.
• UE5 Product Viz. IPhone Lighting Breakdown. UE5 product viz iPhone lighting breakdown.

Rendering & Shader Theory

Foundational rendering and shader theory references.

Related:

• (2014) Ray tracing with OpenGL Compute Shaders. By Kai Burjack - Detailed tutorial series about ray tracing using OpenGL (LWJGL).
• 📺 Advanced Cel Shader ~ Pitchfork Academy. [material].
• 📺 Cel-Shader playlist ~ many. [post-process,Lumin,msc-ue] - 17 videos.
• 📺 Manga/outline Shader playlist ~ many. [post-process,shader] - 18 videos, outlines, toon shaders.
• 📺 Moebius-style 3D Rendering ~ Useless Game Dev. [pre-process,post-process,shader] - Sorbel filter on depth map, crosshatch, fader, etc.
• 📺 stylized comic book shader ~ Chris Folea Makes Things. [pre-process,blueprint] - WITHOUT post processing.
• 3D Game Shaders (source). Open-source project with resources on learning 3D game shaders.
• 3D Game Shaders for Beginners. Clear breakdowns of SSAO, bloom, SSR.
• 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development. A must-read book to be
• 3D Programming Weekly Articles. Great collection of shader and math related resources.
• A Gentle Introduction to Shaders in Unity3D. Series of posts introducing shader coding, oriented to developers with little to no knowledge of shaders.
• A Pixel is not a Little Square!. Classic paper on misconception of "a pixel is a little square." It also serves as an introduction to sampling.
• A Rapid Hierarchical Rendering Technique for Translucent Materials. Jensen & Buhler. SIGGRAPH 2002
• A Survey on Participating Media Rendering Techniques. Cerezo et al. Visual Computer, 2005
• A Trip Through The Graphics Pipeline. A-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline.
• Advanced Creative Coding with WebGL & Shaders. Workshop by Matt DesLauriers that go deeper into graphics programming, math and shaders.
• Advanced Materials in Blender - Shader Editor Tutorial. Advanced Materials in Blender - Shader Editor Tutorial.
• Alan Zucconi's Blog. Shaders and maths. Well explained and very interesting.
• An introduction to Shader Art Coding. Video tutuorial showing the basics of creating art with shaders.
• Anatole Drupat (XT95). Recognized shader artist with a big trajectory ST Profile
• Anime/Toon/Cel Shading Model (Envieous, UE5). Custom UE5 anime/toon/cel shading model. Works with launcher engine versions.
• apitrace. Tools for tracing OpenGL, Direct3D, and other graphics APIs.
• Appleseed. Physically-based global illumination rendering engine.
• Bart Wronski's blog. Bart Wronski shares insights into real-time rendering, post-processing effects, and advanced graphics techniques
• bgfx. Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
• Blender & ACES. Setup Blender to work with ACES using OpenColorIO.
• Blender Addon PBR. Provides a material panel that creates Metallic/Roughness or Specular/Gloss Nodes using the Principled BSDF shader.
• Blender Interplanety Storage (BIS) Freemium. Online material/shader storage add-on for Blender. Save node groups to a personal library and search/upload from inside Blender.
• BNPR Shaders. Collection of NPR shaders for Blender (EEVEE Comics Shader, Erisdraw3D, EEVEEToon).
• Bonzomatic. Live-coding editor for OpenGL pixel shaders, where the results appear on background as you edit the code.
• Brandon Fogerty's blog. A blog focused on real-time rendering, shader programming, and game engine development
• Canvas Debugger. Quick tutorial how to use Firefox's developer tools to debug WebGL Shaders.
• Car Paint Shader Paid. Simple shader setup that lets you easily create a variety of different car paint finishes.
• Casual effects by Morgan McGuire. Morgan McGuire's site is a great resource for those interested in learning about real-time rendering techniques. It provides a wealth of information on various rendering techniques, making it an exc
• Catlike Coding. Focuses on C# and shaders in Unity.
• CelShader. Advanced CelShader project for Unreal Engine 4
• Cesium. Open-source library for world-class 3D globes and maps.
• CineShader. Real-time 3D shader visualiser. Uses the Shadertoy API to bring thousands of existing shader artworks into a cinematic 3D environment.
• Circular Color Picker Unity. Just a shader and a script for a circular color picker.
• CodeXL. AMD's tool suite that includes debugger, profiler and frame/shader analysis.
• Compact YCoCg Frame Buffer. Paper on compact YCoCg frame buffer for small IBL buffers.
• ComputeToys. Innovative and experimental WebGPU compute shader editor designed to help developers explore the capabilities of the WebGPU API for creating high-performance graphics applications in the browse
• CopperLicht. JavaScript library and WebGL 3D engine for creating games and 3D applications.
• CppCon 2018: Valentin Galea “Rapid Prototyping of Graphics Shaders in Modern C++”. Also implemented swizzling with similar techniques.
• Cracked Ice Shader. Cracked Ice material tutorial.
• Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL. Workshop by Matt DesLauriers that teaches you about generative art, interactive animations, 3D graphics, and shaders.
• Custom shaders with Three.JS. Introduction to custom shaders, uniforms, textures and lighting in three.js.
• Cyanilux. Unity shader tutorials (URP focus). Intro to Shader Graph, HLSL, depth, vertex displacement, dissolve, portals, water, fire. Beginner to advanced.
• Cyos. Online shader editor.
• DreamWork's MoonRay. MoonRay is a physically based path-tracing renderer; it includes a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework. GitHub
• Efficient Gradient-Domain Compositing Using Quadtrees. ACM Trans. Graph. 2007
• Embree. High-performance ray tracing kernels that help engineers improve photorealistic rendering performance.
• Everything (or most things) wrong with learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory. Everything (or most things) wrong with learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory.
• Experimental analysis of BRDF models. Ngan et al. Proceedings of the 2005 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering
• Extra Lights. Plugin for Blender that adds physically based, photometric lighting presets to the Add menu. ![market]
• Fabian 'ryg' Giesen's Blog. Fabian Giesen's blog covers topics like rendering, optimization, and low-level programming, with a focus on practical techniques
• Fast Filter-Width Estimates with Texture Maps. GPU Gems 1 - Chapter 25.
• Fast Terrain Rendering Using Geometrical MipMapping. Fast Terrain Rendering Using Geometrical MipMapping.
• Fast Volume Rendering Using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing Transformation. Lacroute & Levoy. SIGGRAPH 1994
• Fft Ocean. Fast Fourier Transform ocean rendering for Three.js
• Filament. PBR engine, available on all platforms (desktop, mobile).
• Flow Map Shader. Flow Map Shader for Unity3D. Used with sprites.
• FogSprites. Modification of Unity's sprite shaders supporting Fog.
• Fragment Foundry. Interactive fragment shader tutorial.
• Fragmentarium. Program to edit and visualize GLSL shaders, mainly focused on fractals and generative systems.
• Framer Motion. A nice animation library for react, and can be used with react-three-fiber too through the framer-motion-3d package usage. Very nice for bindin
• fSync. Unofficial fSpy/Maya bridge which also creates projection shaders.
• Glass for EEVEE. Shader that lets you make realistic glass with EEVEE.
• Global illumination using photon maps. Jensen, H. W. Rendering Techniques 1996
• Glow. Unity ShaderGraph effect test.
• GLSL Sandbox. Online live editor for fragment shaders.
• GlslEditor. Simple WebGL Fragment Shader Editor.
• glslViewer (GitHub). Console-based GLSL Sandbox for 2D/3D shaders by @patriciogv. Battle-tested by its creator, it enables to build a creative pipeline agnostic to the target platform a
• glslViewer (write-up). Live-coding console tool that renders GLSL Shaders.
• GPU Zen Blog. A blog dedicated to GPU programming and advanced rendering techniques, often featuring excerpts from the GPU Zen book series
• Graphics for Games. Introduction to 3D graphics programming including shaders, math post-processing etc. from Newcastle University.
• Graphics Programming Resources. Papers, talks, implementations aggregated by community.
• GrassBending. A replacement for Unity's terrain grass shader with alpha blended rendering and touch bending effect. (#TERRAIN)
• gsap. A mastodon for animations in CSS and for three.js too, backed up by awesome plugins like ScrollTrigger, Flip,.. and mostly framework agnostic.
• GSLS Optimizer. GLSL optimizer based on Mesa's GLSL compiler. Used in Unity for mobile shader optimization. (#SHADERS)
• Houdini Gaussian Splatting Viewport Renderer. A HDK/GLSL implementation of Gaussian Splatting in Houdini
• How does a GPU Shader work?. How does a GPU Shader work?.
• How to Create a Fake 3D Image Effect with WebGL. How to Create a Fake 3D Image Effect with WebGL.
• How to read shader assembly. How to read shader assembly.
• ibreakdownshaders. Explore the math behind shaders.
• Íñigo Quílez. Hardcore math applied to computer graphics, one of the best shader makers out there. ST Profile
• Instanced Line Rendering Part II: Alpha blending. Continue of the above article, and introduces a way to do alpha-blending with triangulated lines.
• Intel Open Image Denoise. Open-source library of high-performance, high-quality denoising filters for ray-traced images.
• Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with Shader-Based OpenGL, 6/E. [Currently can be bought here] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Interactive-Computer-Graphics-Top-Down-Shader-Based/dp/0132545233)
• Intro Three.js. Introduction to Shaders in Three.js
• Introduction to shaders. Part 1 of an introduction to shaders using threejs.
• IOR List. Index of Refraction values list for use with 3D applications.
• ISF. GLSL shaders for use in interactive applications.
• Jendrik Illner's blog. Ubisoft 3D programmer posts a weekly summary of articles on 3D graphics. Shader tutorials, real-time rendering papers, etc.
• Khrnos: Streamlining Render Passes. Introduces the VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension.
• Kick.js Shader Editor. Formal Tool the WebGL engine Kick.js
• KodeLife. Real-time shader editor that supports GLSL, HLSL, and Metal, with a user-friendly interface for creating and testing shaders.
• Learn OpenGL. Deep rendering concepts from scratch (lighting, shadows, PBR, SSAO).
• Learn OpenGL: Skeletal Animation. Learn OpenGL: Skeletal Animation.
• Learn OpenGL: Text Rendering. Learn OpenGL: Text Rendering.
• Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine. Introduces Rotors in Geometric Algebra.
• Light field rendering. Levoy & Hanrahan. Siggraph 1996
• Light House 3D. By Light House 3D
• Lightning Boy Studio. Toon shader, npr.
• Lily Surface Scrapper. Import shaders in Blender from a single URL.
• Lygia (GitHub). Granular and multi-language shader library designed for performance and flexibility by @patriciogv. A cross platform library that will help you iterate on your s
• Lygia (site). Shader library of reusable functions.
• Magnum (GitHub). It is a 2D/3D graphics engine for modern OpenGL.
• Makin' Stuff Look Good. YouTube channel about shaders case studies.
• Marmoset Resources. Baking guides, PBR theory, technical articles.
• Matcap - Spherical Environment Mapping Shader. Matcap - creating a spherical reflection/environment mapping shader.
• Memory Management section on Pbrt. Memory Management section on Pbrt.
• Microfacet Models for Refraction through Rough Surfaces. Walter et al. Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2007
• Mitsuba. A research-oriented retargetable rendering system, written in portable C++17 on top of the Enoki library.
• Multitexturing using a Blendmap. How to use a blendmap to multitexture a terrain.
• NEORT. Digital art platform for creative coders (Fragment Shader, JavaScript Canvas).
• NeRF-Tex: Neural Reflectance Field Textures. Baatz et al., EGSR 2021 | bibtex
• Node To Python. Convert Geometry, Shader, and Compositing nodes to legible Python scripts and add-ons.
• NodeToy. The shader tool for the web. NodeToy provides creators a editor to create incredible new shaders and visual effects. If you are a react-three-fiber user, consider checking
• OpenGL 3D Game Tutorials. Beginners tutorial series about creating 3D games OpenG.
• OpenGL 4 Shaders. Short and sweet introduction to OpenGL shaders by Anton Gerdelan.
• OpenGL/GLSL Shader Programming. Deck on OpenGL/GLSL shader programming.
• Optimally Combining Sampling Techniques for Monte Carlo Rendering. Veach & Guibas. SIGGRAPH 1995.
• Path tracing fractals. By Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen|Arlo.. in a fragment shader by Inigo Quilez|
• Patricio Gonzales Vivo. Main contributor for the magnificent learning site "The book of shaders"
• PBRT v3. Source code for pbrt, the renderer from the third edition of "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To Implementation".
• PBRT v4. Ray tracer from "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation" book.
• Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D. Snavely, Seitz, Szzeliski. Siggraph 2006
• Physically Based Rendering (3rd ed online). Third edition of the PBR book online, with the ray tracer implementation.
• Physically Based Rendering (PBR Book). Full book free online. Definitive PBR reference.
• Physics-Based Animation. Contains learning resources and papers.
• PicoGL.js. Minimal WebGL 2-only rendering library.
• Pixel Shaders. Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming.
• PixelSpirit Elements Deck. This is a tarot deck for learning GLSL shaders. Each PixelSpirit card has a visual element and its GLSL shader code. The cards are ordered from simplest to most complex, building a library of code f
• PixelSpirit GitHub. Library associated with the PixelSpirit Elemens Deck by @patriciogv
• Practical Rendering of Multiple Scattering Effects in Participating Media. Premoze et al. Rendering Techniques 2004: 15th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering
• Procedural Stochastic Texturing. Modified Unity Standard shader implementing Procedural Stochastic Texturing.
• Ptex. A texture mapping system developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios for production-quality rendering.
• Pyro Shader for Redshit, ARnold, Renderman. Pyro Shader for Redshit, ARnold, Renderman.
• Ray Tracey's blog. Sam Lapere's blog, leads the scientific team at EPFL Blue Brain Project. Lots of post about real time rendering
• Ray Tracing Gems. Like other "gems" book, it contains standalone chapters on various ray tracing topics.
• Ray Tracing Gems II. Ray Tracing Gems II.
• Ray Tracing in One Weekend. Peter Shirley's free book to get you implementing a basic ray tracer in C++ in about 40 pages.
• Ray Tracing in One Weekend series. Those three short books explain basic concepts of path tracing and implement a software renderer from scratch.
• Ray Tracing: The Next Week. By Peter Shirley, builds on top of the first books' project, adding more effects, like textures and motion blur
• Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life. Peter Shirley's last book in the series, covering more mathematical themes for complete renderers.
• Raymarching On Unity 5. Raymarcher in Unity 5.
• React Spring. An awesome library about physically accurate animations. Works smoothly also for react-three-fiber using the package
• Real-Time Rendering. Companion site to the book, massive curated link collection.
• Real-Time Rendering Blog. A blog associated with the "Real-Time Rendering" book series, featuring updates on rendering techniques, industry news, and research papers
• Real-Time Rendering recommended books. List of recommended books on the Real-Time Rendering site.
• Realistic water shader. There are also some links with explanation of the approach
• Reddit Two Triangles. General discussion and showcase for shaders.
• RenderDoc. Free and open-source graphics debugging tool that allows developers to capture and analyze frames from DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL applications. It provides a user-friendly interface to inspect
• Rendering Resources - Benedikt Bitterli. Scenes in Tungsten, Mitsuba and pbrt-v3 formats.
• Resources for Writing Shaders in Unity. For the UNITE Boston 2015 talk titled Writing Shaders: YOU can do it!
• Scene.js. Extensible WebGL-based engine for high-detail 3D visualisation.
• Scratchapixel. Ray tracing, rasterization, math foundations from first principles.
• SDFs by Inigo Quilez. All you need to know about SDFs and other shader magic.
• Semi-Automatic Generation of Transfer Functions for Direct Volume Rendering. Kindlmann & Durkin. IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization 1998
• Shader Derivative Functions. Useful for normals.
• Shader Designer. TyphoonLabs' OpenGL Shader Designer
• Shader Displacement for EEVEE Paid. Using a few modifiers and a nodegroup, realtime shader displacement in EEVEE is now possible.
• Shader Editor. Quick tutorial how to use Firefox's developer tools to debug WebGL Shaders.
• Shader Effects. Unity shader effects.
• Shader Graph Tutorials. Project files for our tutorials on using Shader Graph in Unity.
• Shader Lab Lab. A system using T4 Templates to generate Unity ShaderLab code in the Editor.
• Shader Park. A JavaScript library for creating interactive procedural 2D and 3D shaders. Helpful for raymarching shaders (the raymarcher is already built-in, SDFs and boolean operation between them already avail
• SHADERed. Lightweight tool for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders.
• ShaderForge. A node-based shader editor giving you the artistic freedom of shader creation, with no need to code. (Was :moneybag: but now is open source and not maintained).
• ShaderFrog. Online shader editor and asset manager that allows users to create, edit, and export shaders for use in Three.js, Unity, and other game engines. It supports visual shader editing and also offer
• ShaderGif. Open source home for art made with code (WebGL1/2, JavaScript Canvas & P5.js).
• Shaderific for OpenGL. Documentation on GLSL
• Shaderific GLSL. OpenGL ES shading language reference.
• ShaderProject. A container for all sorts of handy shaders.
• Shaders Laboratory. YouTube channel about shaders.
• ShaderShop editor. Visually impactful editor to work on shaping.
• ShaderShop videos. Some awesome videos about ShaderShop.
• ShaderTool. [Win] - Modern shader IDE for programmers and FX artists.
• ShadowDrawer. Shadow matte shader for Unity.
• Shadowing by Non-Gaussian Random Surfaces. Garry S. Brown, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagaion (1980)
• Shaping functions. Awesome set of shaping functions for shaders
• SHDR Editor. Live GLSL shader editor, viewer and validator.
• Stack.gl. Site that approaches Shaders from WebGL
• Stanford Bunny Fur With Unity. Using the Geometry Shader to generate fur on GPU.
• Static Object Intersections - Real Time Rendering Resource Page. A collection of intersection algorithms.
• Substance Academy. Free official Substance Painter/Designer tutorials.
• Synthclipse. Synthclipse is a GLSL shader prototyping tool.
• Takua Renderer. Karl Li's hobbyist physically-based renderer project page with technical write-ups.
• Temporal light field reconstruction for rendering distribution effects. Lehtinen et al. SIGGRAPH 2011
• Terrain Rendering Using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps. GPU Gems 2 - Chapter 02.
• The Art of Code (channel). Tutorials on shaders using ShaderToy, mostly videos on procedural generation.
• The Book of Shaders. Interactive intro to GLSL fragment shaders.
• The Book of Shaders Glossary. Shader glossary by theme.
• The Interactive Shader Format (ISF) Editor. Online tool for creating and editing GLSL shaders in the ISF format, which is commonly used in VJ software, live performance applications, and interactive installations.
• The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 1: How Did We Get Here?. The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 1: How Did We Get Here?.
• The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 2: How Do We Fix It?. The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 2: How Do We Fix It?.
• Three Blender. Blender based tool, to convert your Blender files directly to threeJS.
• Tungsten. High performance physically based renderer in C++11.
• Twigl. Free online shader editor.
• Unity Compute Shader Ray Tracing Practice. Raytracing shader tutorial for Unity.
• Unity Fluid Simulation 2D. Using extended camera to render particles then metalball processing with shader.
• Unity Outline Shader. Source code for Outline Shader tutorial for Unity. Detects edges in a scene using the depth and normals buffers.
• Unity Raymarching Collision. Raymarching x Rigidbody interaction example.
• Unity Shader Cheatsheet. Collection of Unity shader copypastas and gotchas.
• Unity Shader Sketches. Sketches made with ShaderLab in Unity.
• Unity Shader Tutorials. Full project and code for all of my shader tutorials.
• Unity Shaders. Unity project about reseach on shaders and particle system.
• Unity3D Shaders Learning. Ust learning Unity3D shaders here.
• UnityGPUNoise. A set of shaders to help perform various Noise functions on the GPU.
• USD Arnold. USD Schemas and tools for exchanging Arnold shader information between multiple 3rd party packages.
• Vertex Shader Art. Platform for creating and sharing vertex shaders, with a focus on artistic and experimental uses.
• Vertexshaderart. YouTube playlist about vertex shaders.
• VerticalDissolve. Procedural vertical dissolve shader. Highly customizable. Tweak edge color, noisiness & waviness, rim light, emission scrolling.
• VFX good night reading. Curated collection of good reading about VFX and CG.
• VilarVRC. Vilar's Shaders for VRChat.
• Virtual ray lights for rendering scenes with participating media. Novak et al. 2012 SIGGRAPH 2012
• Virtual Terrain Project. Creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.
• WebGL 2 Basics. Blog post about getting started with WebGL 2.
• WebGL 2 New Features. Blog post about whats new and cool in WebGl 2.
• WebGL Fundamentals. This resource provides a thorough understanding of WebGL and its underlying principles, ensuring that you grasp the latest techniques and approaches such as 3D rendering, lighting, 2D transformation
• WebGl Playground. The editor lets you work on the JavaScript code and the GLSL vertex/fragment shaders (if you have any) at the same time in a convenient way. Everything is organized, formatted and highlighted prope
• Whitestorm.js (site). Framework for developing 3D web apps with physics.
• Wind Waker Shader. Cel Shading of two thresholds with a blur/gradient between them for Unity.
• Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer. Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer.
• xeokit. Web Graphics SDK for AEC/BIM applications with 3D-tiles, real-world coordinates and double precision.

Renderer-Specific Learning

Deep-dives for specific render engines.

• Ariev Visuals Resources. Octane tutorials and assets.
• Polymesh to Volume (Arnold). Arnold polymesh to volume conversion.
• Veach Thesis (Stanford). Light transport theory. Foundational PBR thesis.

Render Engines

Also in Software Reference → Render Engines