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Suggestions for a node-based shader / material tool and integration

Started by IkarusDowned Aug 27, 2014 at 10:28 AM 2 replies 2.8k views

Original Post

Aug 27, 2014 at 10:28 AM

Hi All,

I'm looking for trying to use an existing tool which does Node-based shader / material creation (much like Unity and Unreal Engine) which I can take the output and tie into a game engine...specifically, I need to be able to input a texture, run a shader on it, and output a texture.

Our current restriction is that I can't use Unity / Unreal Engine (duh) but would like to give similar power to artists as opposed to having programmers writing them all by hand.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Ashaman73

Aug 27, 2014 at 10:51 AM

It depends a lot on the used engine (supported APIs, input parameters etc). If you have an engine which supports DirectX, then take a look at the shader designer of VS 2013.

IkarusDowned

Aug 28, 2014 at 2:03 AM

Thanks for the post! I'll look into it

AvengerDr

Aug 28, 2014 at 4:15 PM

A while ago I wrote this post. As part of my 3d engine I wrote this shader generation tool that takes a node graph and generates its associated shader code. It is not (yet) visual as VS12's shader designer, but I'd argue it is easier to integrate into your own engine. When a shader is generated through the tool, the system writes some metadata so that when the shader is loaded back into the engine, it know where to fetch the associated parameters.

For example if you define a constant buffer containing a world matrix, then the engine will know that the world matrix refers (for example) to an entity's world matrix and will know how to fetch the relevant matrix accordingly. In this way you don't need to write any ad-hoc shader initialization code on purpose.

You can check it out in my GitHub repository, look for the OdysseyTools.sln file.

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