Introduction to shaders

    Shaders are a special kind of program that runs on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). They were initially used to shade 3D scenes but can nowadays do much more. You can use them to control how the engine draws geometry and pixels on the screen, allowing you to achieve all sorts of effects.

    Modern rendering engines like Godot draw everything with shaders: graphics cards can run thousands of instructions in parallel, leading to incredible rendering speed.

    Because of their parallel nature, though, shaders don’t process information the way a typical program does. Shader code runs on each vertex or pixel in isolation. You cannot store data between frames either. As a result, when working with shaders, you need to code and think differently from other programming languages.

    Suppose you want to update all the pixels in a texture to a given color. In GDScript, your code would use loops:

    Your code is already part of a loop in a shader, so the corresponding code would look like this.

    Note

    The graphics card calls the fragment() function once or more for each pixel it has to draw. More on that below.

    Godot provides a shading language based on the popular OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) but simplified. The engine handles some of the lower-level initialization work for you, making it easier to write complex shaders.

    In Godot, shaders are made up of three main functions: vertex(), fragment(), and light().

    1. The fragment() function runs for every pixel covered by the mesh. It uses values output by the vertex() function, interpolated between the vertices.

    2. The light() function runs for every pixel and for every light. It takes variables from the fragment() function and from its previous runs.

    Warning

    The light() function won’t run if the vertex_lighting render mode is enabled, or if Rendering > Quality > Shading > Force Vertex Shading is enabled in the Project Settings. It’s enabled by default on mobile platforms.

    Instead of supplying a general-purpose configuration for all uses (2D, 3D, particles), you must specify the type of shader you’re writing. Different types support different render modes, built-in variables, and processing functions.

    In Godot, all shaders need to specify their type in the first line, like so:

    Here are the available types:

    Shaders have optional render modes you can specify on the second line, after the shader type, like so:

    Render modes alter the way Godot applies the shader. For example, the mode makes the engine skip the built-in light processor function.

    Each shader type has different render modes. See the reference for each shader type for a complete list of render modes.

    Depending on the shader type, you can override different processor functions. For spatial and canvas_item, you have access to vertex(), fragment(), and light(). For particles, you only have access to vertex().

    The vertex() processing function is called once for every vertex in spatial and canvas_item shaders. For particles shaders, it is called once for every particle.

    Each vertex in your world’s geometry has properties like a position and color. The function modifies those values and passes them to the fragment function. You can also use it to send extra data to the fragment function using varyings.

    By default, Godot transforms your vertex information for you, which is necessary to project geometry onto the screen. You can use render modes to transform the data yourself; see the Spatial shader doc for an example.

    The processing function is used to set up the Godot material parameters per pixel. This code runs on every visible pixel the object or primitive draws. It is only available in spatial and canvas_item shaders.

    The standard use of the fragment function is to set up material properties used to calculate lighting. For example, you would set values for ROUGHNESS, RIM, or TRANSMISSION, which would tell the light function how the lights respond to that fragment. This makes it possible to control a complex shading pipeline without the user having to write much code. If you don’t need this built-in functionality, you can ignore it and write your own light processing function, and Godot will optimize it away. For example, if you do not write a value to RIM, Godot will not calculate rim lighting. During compilation, Godot checks to see if RIM is used; if not, it cuts all the corresponding code out. Therefore, you will not waste calculations on the effects that you do not use.

    The light() processor works differently in 2D than it does in 3D; for a description of how it works in each, see their documentation, and Spatial shaders, respectively.