I've worked on a few different live coding environments in the past, but now I thought I would try to make something simple with Python that could later maybe form the basis for a bigger tool.

Practically every film or video you watch these days is made up from thousands of 8x8 blocks of pixels described by a tiny stream of bits taking up just a fraction of the size of the original uncompressed data.

When the bitrate is high and the compression was done well (for example in a BluRay film), it can be almost impossible to tell this while the image is changing and you aren't sitting close to the screen.

1:1 crop from a 7D RAW video frame. Processed with RawTherapee (sharpening, noise reduction).

A while ago I bought a Canon 7D DSLR camera to use for taking pictures and making videos. It's had a good life so far, producing thousands of pictures and many videos from different events.

Some of the most interesting shaders are self contained 4 dimensional worlds defined entirely by maths. With a powerful GPU rendering them in real time at 60 frames per second, they can look utterly stunning.

But what to do in case you don't have the most powerful GPU to enjoy these?

Well, if you are willing to give up on interaction, another option is to render the shader frames to a file and create a video from them.

So far I've posted 9 articles here covering different techniques for making OpenGL shaders.

For those of you that have been following and trying things out, I thought this might be a good place for a recap.

I introduced the different built-in functions of GLSL as we needed them to achieve different goals, but at some point you might have been wishing for a compact reference to all the available functions.

Now we have a function which can give us a random-ish looking number between 0-1 for every pixel we render with a shader.

By using floor as we did earlier with continuous numbers, we can now have a random number for each different region of the image.

Sometimes, a little noise is all you need to go from synthetic to organic.

The world is unpredictable, and that makes it interesting.

The same rules applies to shaders - unpredictable output makes for more interesting and natural-looking results. So how do you make a shader output unpredictable results?

Smooth looking images have every pixel quite similar to the ones all around them, while still being different enough to form a picture that isn't just one solid colour.

When a shader program is used to make an image, it is typically fed with input values (say x and y coordinates) that are only slightly different for each pixel.

If those slight differences are preserved in the calculations the shader makes, the output image will be smooth.

Interesting images however need changes in them. Tools like step, mod and abs are good for creating those, but still they tend to generate quite predictable images, which are actually not so interesting.