 Alright guys, this week I'm going to talk about shaders, and their role in creating super sexy 3D graphics. Before we really get into it, I should probably explain what a shader actually is. Basically, a shader is a small program that runs on a graphics card or GPU, which manipulates 3D scene during the rendering pipeline before the image is drawn to the screen. These shaders allow for a range of different rendering effects to be created quickly enough for real-time applications such as games. To help me explain how shaders are used in game art, we're going to take a look at vertex shaders and pixel shaders. Vertex shaders are used to modify the position of vertex, color and texture coordinates in the rendering process. Vertex shaders can make changes to vertices that already exist, but they cannot create new ones. This example shows an image before and after changes have been made by the vertex shader. It's not the most attractive of examples, but it does demonstrate what can be achieved simply through the use of shaders. Both images are exactly the same 3D model, but the second image has a shader applied which has modified the position of the vertices in the rendering process. The result leaves the soldier looking like he's got a shellfish allergy and he's just finished working his way through a bucket of prawns. There is an almost limitless amount of uses for vertex shaders, but good examples that really show how these shaders work can be seen with water shaders such as in this example. Here you can see that the height of the vertices is being modified by the vertex shader to create the effect of the water rippling. A pixel shader is used to calculate effects on individual pixels. Generally these deal with working out what colour each pixel should be, but in doing so have to deal with things such as translucency, shadows, fogging and lighting. One of the most popular uses for pixel shaders is using bump maps or normal maps to affect how the geometry looks when it is reacting to light. This makes the models look much more detailed without the need for very high polygon counts. Here's an example of the effect adding a normal map can have. Both of the models in this image have identical polygon counts, but the one on the right has a normal map applied. The pixel shader takes the data provided by the normal map and uses this to adjust the colour of the pixels depending on how they should react to the light that is being applied. So that's what shaders are all about. I hope I've given a clear explanation of what they are, and if you think that I have, please show me your support by hitting that thumbs up button below the video. I upload a new video every week, so if you want to see more videos like this one, then please subscribe to my channel. If you have any questions or comments on this video, or anything else to do with 3D graphics, game design, or even media studies in general, then drop a comment below the video, or you can contact me through any of the methods you can see on screen. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.