CGFX shader trouble

Ikosan

Hi,
I'm having trouble getting some CGFX shaders (namly the IcUber Shader from http://blog.leocov.com/p/downloads.html) to work. I have an Nvidia Quadro FX 3500 and am running DirectX 11 and have all the latest drivers as far as i can tell. However when i link up all the lights and texture maps it stays pink, i never get to the green untextured faze. I've got hardware texturing applied and am in textured mode but no luck. Wired thing is that i can get some cgfx shaders to work, but both the kodde and icuber shaders are having it. Anyone come across this problem before?

Xoliul

Uhh, I very rarely use Maya shaders, but try turning either hardware texturing or textured mode OFF. I remember there being some very counter-intuitive setting there.

Ikosan

i've managed to get a few scene with the shaders working, seems i definatly need hardware texturing and textured mode turned on. Although strangly i opened a scene once with everything set up and it worked from the get go, closed it, opened it again and nothign worked, closed it opened it up again and it was working. These shader's seem really damn buggy still can't get the IcUber shader to work though

Xoliul

I typed down some stuff here for the maya version of my shader:
http://www.laurenscorijn.com/viewportshaderfaq

Gotta be honest though, Maya is really shitty with viewport shaders, if you want decent support, go to 3DS Max.

Ikosan

so I just installed the trial version of Maya 2012 (was using 2011) and it now works.... guess your right about Maya's shitty viewport rendering, sort it out autodesk...

haiddasalami

Yeah I had this problem when I was developing my shaders so I just stuck with the hlsl plugin even though its interface drives me insane.

Ikosan

ok, so i'm a bit new to these viewport renderers, whats the difference between cgfx and hlsl?

Xoliul

They're two languages in which you can write shaders.
CGFX was developed by Nvidia and is cross-platform. It works with OpenGL as well as DirectX. Unreal engine uses this to keep support for PS3 for example.
HLSL was developed by Microsoft and only works with DirectX (and thus windows/Xbox360). It's very similar to CGFX though.

You might wonder "but Maya is OpenGL, how can HLSL even work then?". That's what the plugin does I guess, don't ask me how exactly but they might just be translating the HLSL code to CGFX first (possible since it's similar).

The whole difference really doesn't matter to you much. Most Maya shaders are written in CGFX since the support and compiler is slightly better, while in Max it's the other way around, HLSL is much better supported. That's why I choose to stick with it.