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Shader Basics, Blending & Textures • Shaders for Game Devs [Part 1]

Freya Holmér · course · Watch on YouTube

Computer graphics & renderingGame programming & engines

What it is

The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as a good first-steps shader tutorial that also teaches broad graphics knowledge.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “this is a good tutorial but also lots of good info about graphics in general”

    Good tutorial with broad graphics information.

    high_byte, 2021-09 · Recommendation · in “Visualize 3D hyperbolic honeycombs and sphere packings”

  2. “I liked this tutorial series as a "first steps" by Freya Holmér”

    First-steps shader tutorial series.

    honkycat, 2022-02 · Recommendation · in “The harsh truth of video games programming”

  3. “Freya[2] also has a good number of videos on it.”

    Freya has many videos on shaders.

    FjordWarden, 2025-04 · Recommendation · in “Shadertoys Ported to Rust GPU”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: shaders, unity, vertex shader, fragment shader, game graphics

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