My path to engineer has been a strange one. I have a CS minor, but my degree was in Asian Studies, and I spent quite a lot of time abroad. I eventually moved out to California and enrolled in grad school, with the complete expectation of doing public policy work. My passion since childhood, however, has always been video-games. At the last moment, I withdrew from enrollment in grad school and decided to see if I could make a go of it.
I started out as an entry-level play-tester at the free to play games company, Kabam, before moving on to a technical QA Analyst role. After that, I moved on and moved up, taking QA Engineer, then Gameplay Engineer roles at KIXEYE, before moving on to a Senior Software Engineer role at FunPlus - both game companies. Now I'm at Matterport, building out some seriously futuristic tech with a team of incredibly proficient engineers.
As somebody that entered the tech industry through a non-standard channel, I am an advocate for continued, disciplined self instruction. Having benefited from so many resources online and shared across the community, it is only fair that I try to give back.
We'll start with what shaders are, how they work, the different varieties of shaders, and some cool effects that they make possible. Then, we'll cover shaders in Unity, from a graphics pipeline as well as engineering workflow standpoint.
Finally, we'll actually write a shader together. Along the way, we'll touch on some math concepts as well.