Shadron Reviews

I found this piece of software very useful for procedural editing of images. I recommend it for animators, graphic designers and any geeks that like to play with graphics :-).

Truly awesome, however if you buy it consider that you will not be able to run multiple instances when bought from steam, and you will need to auth with steam to start the program every time. If you buy it of the author's website this will not apply. It is also abandoned but very complete as it is, able to handle whatever you want to do, since it's really a scripting language. Perfect for learning glsl or experimenting. Extremely little documentation, examples and tutorials available. You better want to trial and error when it comes to the program's own scripting language. If you do, it can do powerful stuff.

Shadron is many things at once; effective for creating shaders and effects, a bit tough to get into, focused on what it is good at, a great way of prototyping. I already had some knowledge of writing shaders from ShaderToy before I began which helped a lot when getting used to Shadron. But I definitely feel that it has helped me push my skills further and more easily forward than other tools I've tried. It simplifies a lot of the boilerplate setup to let you focus on just doing what you're after; creating exciting new effects. The documentation covers most topics you'd be interested in it isn't exactly streamlined for easy learning, instead focusing on being a reference for when you forget things. Where the documentation can be lacking the included sample files are great for getting an idea of how to do things (though they're not extensive). I totally understand the issues others are having about getting into the tool but for me, it's just so much easier to get going in now that I'm used to it compared to most other tools. Importing images, selecting colors and adjusting parameters is so incredibly easy. And just the fact that it has a simple way of exporting images, MP4-clips or gifs is a godsend. The only thing I've started to find lacking is an easy way of setting up 3D scenes of objects with simple lighting and shading. But at the same time I feel that would be outside the scope of Shadron, at that point I should be looking at something larger like a game engine anyway. In the end it is still my go to tool when I want to spend a little time creating a new effect I've just come up with. And for that, it has been perfect.

A kind of Shader programming sandbox. It is pretty similar to Synthclipse and Fragmentarium. It is much more lightweight than Synthclipse though. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. But for many things Shadron will do just fine. Shadron has no built-in editor, which I actually prefer. It automatically reloads your file on changes. I kind of hope there will be some kind of model import in the future. But as it is, it is well worth the money. It is very easy to get mipmapped textures in and do things like convolution, colour transforms etc. Things like fractals are simple to get going with too.

Shadron is an absolutely fantastic software and Incredibly underrated tool! If you are game developer or asset creator who can use GLSL this is a MUST HAVE tool! Using it in combination with Photoshop for texture processing alone is already an ultimate boost! Just for a 2 hours of experiments it became an very important addition in my asset creation pipeline, it would save me days and weeks of work. Exporting cube maps, sprite and video animations shifts this tool to another level of awesomeness. Shadron really deserve more attention, very sad to see that almost nobody knows about this tool. It is really worth make a thread about Shadron on Unity or UE4 forums, with examples like custom normal-map generator, water caustic animation loop and parametric pixel art explosion sprite animation, devs would love it! Also if you have a Paypal account then better buy it from official Shadron web-page.

This is really cool, but buying it on Steam means you have to deal with Steam's DRM when using it. That's really annoying for a tool like this, and I recommend you just buy it straight from the developer's website.

Does what it's meant to. Great for experimenting with shaders. One feature that the developper added following my first review : A fps counter, which is a nice addition when you try to optimise shaders. Thank you for listening to the feedback !

[i]I bought this software after being awed by the demos. It hasn't fully lived up to my expectations, but that is due to the documentation, not the software itself. I'm rather new to GLSL, so the docs don't provide the level of detail I need I guess. I will continue to tinker with it, it does have a relativly active subreddit for help.[/i] [h1]Pros:[/h1] [list] [*]Very easy to use (Software, not nessecarily api) [*]Semi-active Subreddit [*]Very fast, no lag [*]Easy to follow tutorial, but hard to know what to do from there [*] Many code examples in steam folder [/list] [h1]Cons:[/h1] [list] [*]Documentation not the best for beginners [*]Crashes every now and then, but really not a big deal [*]Only one tutorial video, hopefully more will come soon [/list]

Shadron is its own unique application compared to other image editors like Adobe Photoshop and Gimp. In Shadron, you have no tools. Instead, you make your own tools. Through writing a script that is similar to a OpenGL shader, you can do a bit short of everything in the field of graphics editing. If you're entirely new to writing shaders, this should be relatively quick to learn if you have a basic understanding of the color theory and programming. The programming language is similar to C. (Might be exactly C, I think) One of the nicest things is when you save your changes to your script, Shadron is very quick to apply the changes. There are also parameters, where you can define a range and the (primitive) data type. I've been waiting for this bloody thing to get greenlit for months. It's met far more expectations than No Man's Sky. Worth it. Cheaper too. Who needs to explore a procedural universe when you can make one? 10/10

An [b]awesome way to learn glsl[/b] and the examples are good and plenty. I might use this tool to teach my students about glsl. Currently there is only one video tutorial online but it gives you a very good start. The documentation on their website is sparse and I couldn't find out if the "file()" function can be used to handle text files as well (for visualization of data which they used as an example in their promo video) but I'm sure the community will create awesome tutorials soon.