.FX authoring tool with a visual interface?

PaK

Has anyone ever used a shader/.FX authoring tool with a good interface? Like RTzen...but accually for sale. RTzen is no longer availiable.

We need to make shaders with a nice user-friendly tool that can bea easily taught to hands-on, non-techie artists.

-R

Jeff Parrott

Try emailing RTZen and being really nice. Doesn't ATI have a program similar?

Squid

That's a shame, rtzen showed a ton of promise.

rendermonkey and fxcomposer are pretty much your only choices at this point and neither could be considered non-techie friendly.

poopinmymouth

As of right now, there is no such *commercially* available product. FX_composer and Rendermonkey are not artist tools, they are 100% for coders. RTzen is nice, but it's pretty limited (I managed to score a license before they totally went kaput). Had it lasted longer I'm sure more functionality would have been added.

Your only real option is to develope something in house, which is what a few places are doing.

FatAssasin

You can theoretically create FX files from the material editor in Max, but I haven't done it myself so I don't know how well it would work in an actual production. Like how much manual tweaking you'd have to do to the FX file after it gets exported from Max or how useful the FX file is outside of bringing back into Max.

Sage

XSI is supposed to let you create real time shaders and has a plugin for exporting to fx files. I have not tried saving as fx yet. I did play a little with making realtime shaders in XSI but it was not as easy as I thought it would be. You can only use realtime shader nodes which I thought was limiting and I have not gone in depth enough to see what can be done.

Alex

PaK

thx sage, p00p, FA. I will make some suggestions to my tech dept accoprdingly.