Hello and a newbie question

[Mykyndryd]

Hi Eric and the Magic community.

I'm Mike and live in Cumbria in the North of England and have just purchased this excellent program.

I'm primarily a musician and wanted to add some effects to my music videos which are mainly New Age / slower music.

As one of your other posters has asked whether this can be done, I've tried it with some of the stock modules and it can be done very easily and works well especially if you mix and match with tone / freq rather than just volume etc., this is the perfect program for doing that (I'll post some vids when uploaded). But enough about me ...

Newbie question:
I have done some coding in the past and wanted to jump into creating my own GLSL shaders. There is a wealth of information on the internet and in the Tutorial section here but so much and there's a few things I'd like to understand better. The basic concepts that escape me right now are:

Uniform Time (and other Uniform statements) - is this a value that is passed by Magic to the GLSL shader and what is its value range?

Vec2, Vec3 etc. They all seem to have built in properties such as position and such like, is there a list anywhere of associated properties and value ranges?

I can create a static image using GLSL (circle) and specify a colour but cannot yet grasp how to make it move, ripple or change colour etc.

Is there a GLSL for dummies page anyone know of (I've tried sandbox but it seems to give a variant of the same thing each time (as far as I can tell).

As I say, lots of info out there but even the simplest only describes these things rather than explains them (from what I've seen so far). Just looking for some kind of quick start ...

The reason why I want to create my own from scratch is to ensure I'm not breaching any copyrighted material as these shaders will be utimately used in my marketing vids for music.

Wow, that's a long first post ... thanks and it's nice to be part of this.

[Magic]

Hi Mike, thanks for your interest. I think a good place for you to start would be https://thebookofshaders.com/, as it answers almost all of your questions (such as how Uniforms work) and is pretty newb-friendly . It also focuses on fragment shaders, which is different than a lot of other shader tutorials, but it's what you want.

I also recommend that you check out http://shadertoy.com/ and https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/ (ISF), because they let you play around interactively in your browser. You might want to click around a bit and try to find some simple examples (with not too many lines of code) to see how to create movement/etc.

Magic uses the same frameworks as Shadertoy (for the GLSLShader module) and ISF (for ISF modules), so if you understand how they work, you'll understand how Magic works.

[Mykyndryd]

Hi Eric.
Thanks for the info. Just browsing thebookofshaders.com right now.
Exactly what I was after.

Thanks.