It seems to me, as not so 3d savy, that 3d objects and shaders have a similar connection as html structure and css. Nowadays you need a structure of objects yet the layout, color and behavor comes from css.
In this regard, 3d scenes offer the elements but shaders can design them much more efficient than a engine ever could.
Is that accurate?
Btw, can objects modified by shaders signal collisions?
3D scenes (closest thing to the DOM) and materials (closest thing to CSS) are several abstraction layers above what modern 3D APIs provide, this is more 'rendering/game engine' territory.
3D APIs are more on the level of 'draw this list of triangles, and the color of a specific pixel in the triangle is computed like this: (hundreds of lines of pixel shader code)" - but even this is slowly being being replaced by even lower level code which implements completely custom rendering pipelines entirely on the GPU.
Shaders are not layout. I don't think there is an HTML/DOM analogy here that works. But if you had to force one, shaders are more like Javascript. It's a terrible analogy though.
Collisions aren't part of a graphics API.
> Collisions aren't part of a graphics API.
You can do occlusion queries though, which is a form of 2D collision detection similar to what home computer sprite hardware provided ;)
There is, CSS shaders, or Project Houdini.
- https://alteredqualia.com/css-shaders/article/
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Houdini_API...