ShaderFX possibilities

PolyHertz

For those who have used ShaderFX, of these what is possible via the current version of the progam?:

Fire
Smoke/gas
Hair/fur
Water
light-trails
heat distortion
rim-glow (aura)
emmisive texture-sequence glow
sub-shaders (ex: micro structure texture with reflection and glow at the same time)

Rob Galanakis

Anything you can do just in a pixel shader. Anything you need application-side programming or post-processing effects, you can't do... yet.

I'm not sure what you mean by some of those examples, as you can do things like fire, smoke, and water 100 different ways. But the more advanced methods you see, no, because they require heavy particle effects and programming (but the particles are likely rendered with a shader you could make in SFX).

Light trails and heat distortion you can't do. Generally when you're talking about pixel shaders, you're concerned with representing surfaces.

PolyHertz

Well for heat distortion I assume the effect can be faked using clear planes in front of the area the heat comes from. It could then clone an image of the pixels viewable through it and repeatedly refresh the captured image while offsetting the pixels in various directions.

Or something along those lines.

Vailias

yeah. Exactly. cept you can do it with one plane, use the framebuffer as the texture and you could distort the pixels by a scatter algorithm, but more often these days would be a procedural normal map to use as a virtual surface to refract through.