Accelerated Art with GLSL

In this tutorial Peter Marks will introduce the GL Shader Language (GLSL) and show how it can be used to create visually rich, animated, algorithmic art.

The session will be hands-on with simple exercises and opportunities for your own creativity. You should come away ready to create your own GLSL art.

Why GLSL?

GL Shader Language (GLSL) was created to provide a way to describe sophisticated textures and materials in 3D models, games and other applications. It is part of OpenGL, a very popular open standard for programming 3D graphics, and is available on almost all desktop computers, laptops, dedicated games consoles, tablets and mobile phones.

An important reason for using OpenGL is that it can be accelerated using the special graphics hardware (called a GPU (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Processing_Unit)) in your computer, laptop or smartphone, enabling even very intricate and rich scenes to be animated very smoothly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USMRLAXalgU

This tutorial will focus on using GLSL to create organic, dynamic images such as the plasma example above. The same tools and ideas can be used to create a wide range of generative art from tessellations to fractals, liquids or smoke simulations.

Peter will cover:

• Core shader language concepts and structures

• Coding shaders in a Web browser using WebGL

• Using simple mathematical functions to generate images

The talk will assume no knowledge of GLSL, but some coding experience in any language would be helpful. You will need to bring a laptop with a modern browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge. Please check whether your browser is compatible at this site https://get.webgl.org/ - you should see a spinning cube.

Please arrive 6.30pm for a 6.45pm start.

To attend this event, please make sure you sign up at SkillsMatter too: https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/9327-accelerated-art-with-glsl