Who made this thing?

My name is Aaron Cooper and I work as a professional graphics software engineer in the video game industry. I’ve been playing around with rendering engines and shaders for the last decade and plan to be doing it for years to come.

Why I made this thing

The first program I created related to helloGPU was helloTexture back in 2016. It looked very different from its current and served mainly as a .dds viewer. The project I was working on at the time had some very weird properties in their headers and I wanted to be able to inspect it more easily. After that I needed a program to easily inspect mips and look at the slices of a 2d array texture. Over time I just slowly added features and image format support.

As for helloShader, I started working on it in late 2017 out of a want to prototypes shaders faster. In the past, my go to shader prototyping tool was Unity. It’s a great engine and really easy to dive in to, but I found shader development a bit cumbersome and slow. Their shader code is filled with custom macros and functions to help setup transforms and lighting operations. Theres also a lot of custom syntax for setting up rendering states and I always had to keep referring to the reference. But really what I wanted was a simple, hlsl and glsl, previewing tool that gave me access to the underlying DirectX and OpenGL rendering states. That’s how helloShader was born.