I know I am not supposed to evangelize other products here but I just ran across this and had to share it.
And I also know that Windows is the enemy and MS is evil blah blah blah... Visual Studio 2012 has recently added a bunch of graphics tool. Including the ability to open FBX files, view them in 3D and play back animations...and it even has a node based shader designer to author and debug HLSL shaders. My TAD and I stumbled across this when we accidentally opened an FBX file in Visual Studio 2012...and after some digging found a whole bunch of cool stuff. I would imagine that its mostly game devs\TADs that are going to like this stuff ________________________________ * Add, edit, and compile HLSL shaders more easily. You can use syntax coloring, indenting, and outlining when you are coding HLSL shaders, and MSBuild automatically supports the Microsoft HLSL Compiler (fxc.exe). * View and modify image assets more efficiently. You can use the Image Editor to create, inspect, and modify bitmap and compressed image formats (DDS, TGA, TIFF, PNG, JPG, GIF), and the editor supports transparency and mipmaps. For more information, see Image Editor<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315744.aspx>. * Work with 3-D models. You can use the Model Editor to inspect standard 3-D model formats (OBJ, COLLADA, and Autodesk FBX). You can also use the built-in 3-D primitive generation and materials to create placeholder art for 3-D games and apps, thereby improving artist-developer workflow. For more information, see Model Editor<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315734.aspx>. * Create advanced pixel shaders. You can use the Shader Designer, which is a graph-based shader creation tool that provides a live preview of the effect, to create advanced pixel shaders and export them as HLSL code that you can use in apps that are based on DirectX. For more information, see Shader Designer<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315733.aspx>. Also there is this video on Channel 9 showing some of these features off. http://channel9.msdn.com/(A(DIZWlv8LzQEkAAAAOTQ0NWI2ZTUtM2ZlYS00Yjg1LTg4NzMtNzJhZjA1MmUwZmMxAmqfHykWJRBKmZh75HL0--PjXeY1))/posts/Visual-Studio-3D-StarterKit Right around 12:30 mark you can see the shader designer in action. Fun stuff. Cheers! _______________________________________________________________________________ Marc Brinkley GO GO GO Microsoft Studios [Fun]ction Studio marc.brinkley [at] microsoft.com
