Shadergarden is a tool for building hot-code-reloadable shader pipelines. For a tutorial for how to get started, consult the introductory blog post or the shadergarden lisp language documentation.

Once you've installed shadergarden via cargo install shadergarden, test to see that it is installed properly by running:

shadergarden --help

This should print out some usage information. To create a new project, run:

shadergarden new path/to/project

This will create a new example project in the specified directory. To run a shadergarden, cd into the directory of a project and run:

shadergarden run

This should open a new window and start running your graph. Don't close the window if you want to make changes; instead, open the project in an editor of your choice - the graph will update on save.

If a build error is encountered while reloading, shadergarden will log the error and continue executing the old graph.

You can pass input images and videos to shadergarden using the -i flag. This flag takes a list of paths to photos/videos - you must pass the same number of input photos/videos as the number of (input ...)s specified in shader.graph.

Once you've got a nice shadergarden, to render out a png sequence, use the render subcommand. This subcommand works exactly the same as run, but requires an output directory. To render the game of life demo out into a gif, run:

mkdir out
shadergarden render demos/life -o out -s 30 -e 430
ffmpeg -i "out/frame-%4d.png" -framerate 30 life.gif

You should see something like this (it might be a little fancier):

Happy hacking!