Feedback on future shader work

kodde

Hey guys,

I'm contemplating on recreating and improving my "KoddeShader" to a v2.0 from scratch.

I've got a mindmap of the work around this project

Please give me some feedback on my ideas here. Am I going in the wrong direction? Am I missing anything?

Thanks

Eric Chadwick

Looks good to me!

Can't wait to see this in Blender!

throttlekitty

Looks good to me.

With parallax, do you plan to include different popular methods as choices? It seems to always be in flux with each new game. I was going to suggest normal map w/inline AO, but that might be too specific anyway.

A toon-style outline shader option would be nice as well.

Vrav

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Looks good to me!

Can't wait to see this in Blender!

Can you explain? Deeply interested! I see 'Matcap with Blend'... but... oh, I've been had haven't I

kodde

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Eric> Bleeehnder? No Maya :P
To be fair I don't see why this shader would not work in any other app. Just needs a few alterations. Making sure the axises are correct for cube maps and hemi ambient, tweaking the code for the UI elements.

throttlekitty> I'm going to be creating this in Mental Mill 1.0 and then doing some alterations by had at the end. I'm not sure which method they use, but that's probably what I will be using. Would be cool to try different methods. I'll write it down, but it will be quite far down the priority queue

"normal map w/inline AO" as in AO stored in alpha channel or as in Self Shadowed Bump Map? Storing data in certain texture channels is easy peasy. The later would be cool, if I have time and can figure out how to. I will for instance most probably have the user store the gloss texture in the specular alpha channel. I should probably show this in the min map diagram.

I would love to do some form of toon shader or any other post processing effect, but there's no post processing in Maya's viewport as far as I know. Is there any other way to do this without doing it in post? Only way I can think of would be based on the polygon density of your object and those generally do not look that good on game models.

kodde

Vrav wrote: »

Can you explain? Deeply interested! I see 'Matcap with Blend'... but... oh, I've been had haven't I

"Matcap with Blend" as in possiblity to load a mapcap texture which is camera based, similar to ZBrush, Mudbox, etc. The blend was intended to be some manner of blending this matcap together with the rest of the chain.

Vrav

Yeah, that's what one would normally think - I was just trying to understand Eric... though you should make cool stuff for Blender, heheh. I think that's what Eric was joking/hinting at, since your work has hit Maya and Max so far.

Eric Chadwick

Heheh, joke yes. Blender is an up-and-comer though, worth a look-see.

kodde have you checked out pico? It's a free hardware renderer for Maya that supports custom HLSL, and a bunch of post effects.
http://plastic-demo.nazwa.pl/wordpress/?page_id=403

Eric Chadwick

There's also ASHLI, but I don't know if you any docs on AMD.com (a quick search there yielded nada).
http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2010help/index.html?url=Example_Plugins_ASHLI_shader.htm,topicNumber=d0e664639

kodde

Eric> Yes I have tried out pico. Has some quite cool stuff going on. Although it is supposed to support CGFX shaders I could not get it to work :´(

I tried the regular FX Shader plugin for Maya. Didn't know about ASHLI. Does it support post processing? Have you tried it?

Eric Chadwick

Haven't no, just found it this morning in fact. Someone on CGTalk suggested it for post-processing.