Interesting, I always assumed shader code was generated by the engine and tweaked by gurus. In all the talk here about backend vs frontend or which engine to use, you never hear about companies explicitly hiring shader programmers. And learning resources are scarce. It’s kind of a dark art.
It’s funny, I was a graphics person hired specifically to write shaders (20 years ago, in a studio that had their own in-house engine) but didn’t end up writing any at all for games, I did almost everything but shaders. :P
There is definitely a consolidation of game engines happening in the industry. I don’t know how it’s affecting shader writing jobs, but I can imagine it’s quickly becoming less of a thing. Still, I hear a lot about people writing shaders for and doing customization on top of Unreal today.
Interesting, I always assumed shader code was generated by the engine and tweaked by gurus. In all the talk here about backend vs frontend or which engine to use, you never hear about companies explicitly hiring shader programmers. And learning resources are scarce. It’s kind of a dark art.