Vertex Shader Art
The Vertex Shader Art process runs shaders based on the Vertex Shader Art convention. A VSA shader generates vertices procedurally in the vertex stage; the fragment stage only displays the color produced by the vertex shader.
Use VSA for lightweight point clouds, line art, particle-like procedural visuals, and imported Vertex Shader Art examples. Use Render Pipeline instead when you need custom fragment shading, geometry inputs, buffers, depth / blend state, or scene rendering.
Authoring a visual
Use the Vertex Shader Art reference for header fields, vertex outputs, time and resolution variables, and a complete rotating spiral. Begin with the three-vertex recipe in Shader cookbook to see how positions and colors form the image. Connect the resulting texture to a video output. Point and line sizes depend on the GPU/backend.
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Related Processes
- ISF Shaders: Fullscreen fragment shaders.
- Compute Shaders: Compute shaders for images, buffers, and geometry.
- Render Pipeline: Raw vertex / fragment raster pipeline.
- Model Display: Built-in 3D geometry renderer.
- Lightness Computer: Convert rendered textures to LED pixel arrays.
Try it
For a more elaborate moving point cloud, download the example score. Its shader calculates the points’ positions and colors and sends the resulting image directly to a window. Reduce the vertex count from the saved 99,999 to see how a sparser set of points changes the image. This download uses a point-cloud-and-spheres shader, not the simpler spiral from the reference example.