The best darn grid shader yet (2023)

This is really awesome. to ask a dumb question, what’s a good way to get acclimated with running and building shaders? Just going straight to OpenGL tooling and extrapolating from there?

Book of Shaders + ShaderToy is how a lot of people cut their teeth.

What makes ShaderToy great is the extremely fast turnaround time.

Make changes, compile (in e.g. < 0.1s) and you immediately see the result. In Unity/Unreal you can also work on them, and in certain places you can see results in near real time too, but it takes a few more clicks and saves etc.

Depending on what you’re after, the common recommendation to start with book of shaders or shadertoy may be counterproductive. In my experience using shaders, fragment shaders are a place where I spend a lot of time and effort, and I do a decent amount of computation directly on textures, but the sort of stuff done in fullscreen quad ‘picture in a box’ shaders as in Book of Shaders and ShaderToy is, I believe, unproductively mind-shattering and abstract for beginners. To learn shader fundamentals I’d suggest you write a particle system (in compute or in vertex+frag) or even a raymarching renderer or something, rather than just bang your head against animating patterns on a single frag.