I began playing around with hydra a bit today (and I’m only six months behind…). It’s really straightforward to program in, but thinking about the resulting image one pixel at a time took a little getting used to. The environment that Adobe provides for developing shaders is fantastic. It automatically creates control sliders when you declare parameters, so you can tweak the resulting images on the fly. I’m looking forward to seeing how this shading language is implemented in future versions of the creative suite so I can play with it further. For now, I have a simple displacement function that operates both linearly and radially, and allows you to ‘fade’ out the edges a bit.

For examples by someone with a lot more control over shaders, see Quasimondo. For source code and more, check out the Hydra Gallery (I added mine at the bottom). More photos on flickr.