ShaderFX exists for several years now and was formerly only available to
3dsmax, I didn't even know it was being ported to Maya yet. It's
essentially a nodal shader editor (which was already something considering
that this was way before Max got a native nodal shader editor) that
creates GLSL and DX shading code and loads it back into 3dsmax' Realtime
Material on the fly, which worked really well, not in the least because it
offered a lot of high-level shaders out of the box (inlcuding a SSS
shader).
I used it successfully to create GLSL shaders for use in both Softimage
and Maya (compared to MentalMill I got results real quickly) and it's
something I really miss in Softimage. Although it started all so promising
for Softimage with the introduction of realtime shaders several years ago
(not sure, was that in 5.0? I remember I was really exited) it never
evolved into something really usable - it just feels unfinished, let alone
the missing DX 11 support these days. Admittedly, judging by the amount of
existing devices supporting DX only (XBox and Windows Phones?) vs the
amount of devices supporting OpenGL (which includes Windows PCs, microwave
ovens and probably even my wrist watch) raises the question as to why any
one still cares about DX in the first place. But of course it's hard for
game studios to ignore the Xbox, unless you are a Nintendo- or Sony-owned
studio. Personally I don't understand why support for DX11 was never added
to Soft, I can't be all that different to the way DX9 was implemented. But
what do I know?
From: Matt Lind <[email protected]>
Our game has been DX11 for a while now. It would be nice to see our
HLSL shaders applied
natively to the assets instead of having to be wrapped inside of OpenGL
shaders where we
lose some functionality because not all HLSL features can be ported.
On the subject of shader authoring, my colleague Kees has posted some
more information about ShaderFX, a feature new to Maya LT
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=1122360
there also an autodesk video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRPizhU_oi0
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Stefan Kubicek
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keyvis digital imagery
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