A program that runs on your graphics card, instead of your CPU. Traditional shaders are called "shaders" because they were originally used for texturemaps - that is, like a filter you could run on texture maps.Caydr wrote:One of these days I'm going to learn what a shader is.
The later invention was vertex-shaders, programs that were run on the GPU to actually deform the model itself. You can even use them for skeletal animations - you feed the GPU the undeformed model and bone and weighting info, and then you feed the shader your bone-positions, and the shader program handles posing the vertices of the model according to the bone-positions.
That's similar to what we have here - a fish waggling its tail is a simple algorithm - pretty much a sine wave. That makes it ideal for a vertex shader.
