Hi all, ShaderFX was not abandoned. It has been acquired by Autodesk and its development has moved there. If you want to be on a future beta, drop me an email: kees.rijnen at autodesk. As for the question about node editor versus hand-code. It is mostly a personal preference. From a code inefficiency point of view. if you…
No not slate. I can't say when/what/if anything gets released in any future version of 3dsMax. Sorry. Best I can offer is to put the name of anybody interested on a "future beta list". As for node editor code performance. I think you can get closer then 90% performance wise versus hand written code. It all depends on your…
One of the advantages of the node editors is the frankly absurd iteration speed possible, something that just coding just won't match. The speed of my additions and updates is almost beyond imagination. The flipside is that multiple passes, and other non-standard surface shading, is generally poorly supported (especially…
The HLSL put out by UDK is really messy looking. Pages and pages of conditional stuff most of which is thrown out by the preprocessor, and loads of unnecessary variables all over the place as nodes save their result in a variable every time. (or at least did last time I looked) However, the compiler is intelligent enough…
3rd party? In my case, I make my shaders from scratch in ShaderFX in Max, export to written text and forward it to my buddies for analysis, and if there is a section of the code they don't understand, they can preview it in Max or ask me. As for 'pure' universal translator which is easy to use and can be plugged in an…
Take what I say with a pinch of salt. Engines themselves actually optimize the code pretty well, granted ofcourse that the guys who made the engine knew what to do to make the magic happen. The entire 'nodes are inefficient' issue only exist because many who wrote said infrastructure didn't know what they were doing, and…
So I'm mostly just curious as to how other studios handle this. The tradeoff is between a node-based material editor, or having all the shaders created by a programmer. The advantage of an editor is the artistic flexibility that comes with it, the disadvantage is that it shoots out inefficient shaders. How is this handled…
I'm mostly concerned about my programmers. They're concerned about the performance impact of node-generated code. But if I can give them something that's like 90% of the way there, that's definitely workable. About the Autodesk thing, you're not talking about Slate are you? At least I hope not. Or do you just mean that…