Jean-Marc Le Roux Web, RIAs and chocolate spaghettis…

“Starting With Shaders” Workshop

Update: if you want to learn more about Minko, you can subscribe to our first Minko workshop in Paris, France!

Update 2: I patched the sources to add a few comments and fix a little mistake reported in the comments. Make sure you download the updated sources.

I had the pleasure to animate a workshop just yesterday about "Starting With Shaders" here in Paris, France. It was very nice to meet new people and see what's going on in the heads of some of the most talented French Flash developers. It was also a nice occasion to gather feedback on the new implementation of Minko that we will soon share on GitHub.

I would like to thank the Regart.net formation institute and all the attendees for their attention and support during the event. I think all went well and I will try to do more events like this in the near future.

I presented:

• why shaders are the very fabric of 3D applications
• what shaders really imply on the development workflow
• why AGAL is good for 3D engine developers, but not for game/application developers
• what are the constraints inherited from the classic shader workflow
• how those constraints are solved with Minko

AGAL is explained through 4 examples: solid color, texture, directional lighting and cel shading rendering. Each sample is implemented using both raw AGAL and Minko. Doing AGAL was a bit a pain in the a**. But it was a good reminder of how Minko, ActionScript shaders and the ShaderLab can really empower the developers and the artists. If you don't understand the AGAL implementation, have a look at the ActionScript one which is - of course - much easier to read/work with.

You can download the sources and the slides. They feature an intermediate version of Minko 2 which is basically what we will release in the next few days...