GLSL Fragment Shaders

Write GPU-accelerated fragment shaders for procedural graphics, textures, and visual effects.

When to Use

• Creating procedural textures (wood, marble, clouds, terrain)
• Drawing shapes with distance fields (SDF)
• Generating patterns, noise, gradients
• Building visual effects and animations
• Writing custom shaders for Three.js, WebGL, Processing

Core Concepts

Fragment shaders execute simultaneously on every pixel. Each thread:

• Receives pixel position via gl_FragCoord
• Returns color via gl_FragColor (vec4: RGBA 0.0-1.0)
• Cannot communicate with other threads (stateless)