Warning

THIS TUTORIAL IS NO LONGER OUTDATED...

...but is still untested and may have incorrect information. Proceed with caution. Check with https://github.com/vram-guild/frex/wiki to have the latest API specification. I will eventually update this or make a new tutorial in its place.

So you want to make a Canvas pipeline huh?

A pipeline? No, I want to make a shader pack!

It's the same thing! Shader packs are called Pipelines in Canvas. Although there are also material shaders pack, which is a different type of shader pack. In other words, there are actually two types of "shader packs" in Canvas:

• A set of material shaders.
• A Pipeline - consisting of pipeline configuration(s) and pipeline shaders.

Both of these are loaded as minecraft resources contained in a resource pack. A resource pack isn't limited to one type of resource, that means a resource pack can contain both material shaders and pipelines! (That is right, pipelines with an "s".) Confused? You might want to refresh your knowledge on resource packs, but for the sake of this tutorial we're going to focus on a single resource pack containing a single pipeline (aka a "shader pack").

Specifically, we're going to make a shadow-enabled pipeline with volumetric lights and translucency compositing from scratch. That is right, from scratch! Well, almost from scratch due to the code examples, but we won't be using Canvas's default pipeline because the goal of this tutorial is to teach basic understanding of how the entire pipeline is built from start to finish.

License

The text of this tutorial and its code examples are licensed under CC0 license.

Table of Contents

1: First stop: the G buffer

2: Making the pipeline shader

3: Shading: Using vanilla lighting

3-α: Miscellaneous vanilla effects

4: Adding sky shadows

5: Compositing and advanced translucency

5-1: Setting up fabulous graphics and composite passes

5-2: Writing the vertex and fragment shaders for the composite passes

6: Volumetric lighting

Conclusion

Appendix: Revision history