Shader Programming

Shaders are the small programs that run on the GPU for every vertex and every pixel. Writing them means working out how a material should respond to light, how an effect should blend, and how to get there inside a budget measured in fractions of a millisecond.

The work happens in HLSL or GLSL and in the node-based editors of Unreal and Unity, and it reaches from standard surface materials to post-processing, stylised rendering and the optimisation of an existing pipeline on weaker hardware.

The skill appears in two kinds of job. Technical artists use it to give the art team materials they can work with; rendering and engine programmers use it further down, where the question is how the frame is assembled at all. Profiling on the target platform belongs to both.