I don’t know if anyone else has been as eager to figure out how to make Craft shaders work as I have, but with the help of ChatGPT, I’ve made a major step.
The attached project is a duplicate of @dave1707‘s shader explosion, except where that one uses a Shader-app file asset for its shader, this one does it all in lua, all inside the project itself, making it possible for the first time to examine the workings of a truly complex Craft shader.
Why am I obsessed with Craft shaders? Because a lot of amazing stuff was done with the mesh-system shaders before Craft, and it’s mostly lost to the ages, since almost nobody directly uses meshes anymore. There was a time when I dreamed of going back through all the old mesh projects and converting them into Craft shaders, and I’m not sure I share that ambition today, but the nagging since that more could be done in Craft with shaders has stayed with me.
To generalize this example into a full explanation of its workings would take some detective work, but for the first time, anyone who is interested in playing with Craft shaders can find a lot of what they’re looking for here.
Code Shader Explodey .zip (533.3 KB)