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Converting GLSL to Godot shaders

This document explains the differences between Godot's shading language and GLSL and gives practical advice on how to migrate shaders from other sources, such as Shadertoy and The Book of Shaders, into Godot shaders.

For detailed information on Godot's shading language, please refer to the Shading Language reference.

GLSL

Godot uses a shading language based on GLSL with the addition of a few quality-of-life features. Accordingly, most features available in GLSL are available in Godot's shading language.

Shader programs

In GLSL, each shader uses a separate program. You have one program for the vertex shader and one for the fragment shader. In Godot, you have a single shader that contains a vertex and/or a fragment function. If you only choose to write one, Godot will supply the other.

Godot allows uniform variables and functions to be shared by defining the fragment and vertex shaders in one file. In GLSL, the vertex and fragment programs cannot share variables except when varyings are used.

Vertex attributes

In GLSL, you can pass in per-vertex information using attributes and have the flexibility to pass in as much or as little as you want. In Godot, you have a set number of input attributes, including VERTEX (position), COLOR, UV, UV2, NORMAL. Each shaders' page in the shader reference section of the documentation comes with a complete list of its vertex attributes.

gl_Position

gl_Position receives the final position of a vertex specified in the vertex shader. It is specified by the user in clip space. Typically, in GLSL, the model space vertex position is passed in using a vertex attribute called position and you handle the conversion from model space to clip space manually.

In Godot, VERTEX specifies the vertex position in model space at the beginning of the vertex function. Godot also handles the final conversion to clip space after the user-defined vertex function is run. If you want to skip the conversion from model to view space, you can set the render_mode to skip_vertex_transform. If you want to skip all transforms, set render_mode to skip_vertex_transform and set the PROJECTION_MATRIX to mat4(1.0) in order to nullify the final transform from view space to clip space.

Varyings

Varyings are a type of variable that can be passed from the vertex shader to the fragment shader. In modern GLSL (3.0 and up), varyings are defined with the in and out keywords. A variable going out of the vertex shader is defined with out in the vertex shader and in inside the fragment shader.

Main

In GLSL, each shader program looks like a self-contained C-style program. Accordingly, the main entry point is main. If you are copying a vertex shader, rename main to vertex and if you are copying a fragment shader, rename main to fragment.

Macros

The Godot shader preprocessor supports the following macros: * #define / #undef * #if, #elif, #else, #endif, defined(), #ifdef, #ifndef * #include (only .gdshaderinc files and with a maximum depth of 25) * #pragma disable_preprocessor, which disables preprocessing for the rest of the file

Variables

GLSL has many built-in variables that are hard-coded. These variables are not uniforms, so they are not editable from the main program.

Variable	Type	Equivalent	Description
gl_FragColor	out vec4	COLOR	Output color for each pixel.
gl_FragCoord	vec4	FRAGCOORD	For full screen quads. For smaller quads, use UV.
gl_Position	vec4	VERTEX	Position of Vertex, output from Vertex Shader.
gl_PointSize	float	POINT_SIZE	Size of Point primitive.
gl_PointCoord