Shader and Panel Editors planned?
by Will Zettler · in Torque 3D Professional · 04/24/2009 (9:39 pm) · 6 replies
www.terathon.com/c4engine/shot.php?shotname=shader
www.terathon.com/c4engine/shot.php?shotname=panel
Will Torque 3D have anything like these two things? I thought they would be pretty cool if you could edit up the shader and panels like this. Just an idea... this is from the https://www.terathon.com/c4engine/index.php C4 engine. Looks pretty impressive, might give T3D a strong run for it's money. Oh and no, I haven't played the C4, just stumbled upon it thinking it would be cool to have these features in T3D.
Will
www.terathon.com/c4engine/shot.php?shotname=panel
Will Torque 3D have anything like these two things? I thought they would be pretty cool if you could edit up the shader and panels like this. Just an idea... this is from the https://www.terathon.com/c4engine/index.php C4 engine. Looks pretty impressive, might give T3D a strong run for it's money. Oh and no, I haven't played the C4, just stumbled upon it thinking it would be cool to have these features in T3D.
Will
About the author
- Ambient sound artist since 2004 - Texture artist since 2001 - Terrain designer since 2006 - Android app design since 2016 - Game design (Sky Fall, A_Clone) 2018
#2
04/25/2009 (12:49 am)
On the GUI to Texture, that would rock. I loved the old resource.
#3
Yeah I found that shader editor pretty slick but I know from watching your work and others here that we can make a far better editor for either the panel or shader builder. I know we have talent here, we just have to get with someone who could build something of this level. I'm not a coder, but I would try to help if anyone wanted to take on the project.
Do you maybe still have a link to the old resource so I could play around with it? Thanks for the info man. Can't wait to see what you all do with the engine now.
Will
04/25/2009 (4:41 pm)
@ Tom:Yeah I found that shader editor pretty slick but I know from watching your work and others here that we can make a far better editor for either the panel or shader builder. I know we have talent here, we just have to get with someone who could build something of this level. I'm not a coder, but I would try to help if anyone wanted to take on the project.
Do you maybe still have a link to the old resource so I could play around with it? Thanks for the info man. Can't wait to see what you all do with the engine now.
Will
#4
Now here's the catch...
There are a ton of schematic shader generating tools out there on the market. So what is really needed is to go down the Unreal route of making one that is not just integrated into the engine, but also uses all of the engines inner workings to function as well. Thus not only giving you a real-time preview of the shader itself, but also like I said before a shader that works without needing a programmer to clean it up. Anything short of making an Unreal type shader system is pretty pointless IMHO, but making something as good as Unreals would take a lot of hard work and effort.
04/25/2009 (5:17 pm)
Their shader editor looks like the one you get in the Unreal engine, which is pretty awesome since it has a huge benefit of building shaders that work exactly as they need to in the engine. This way an artist can make cool shaders and programmers don't have to worry about cleaning up and fixing up what the artist creates (like they typically do now).Now here's the catch...
There are a ton of schematic shader generating tools out there on the market. So what is really needed is to go down the Unreal route of making one that is not just integrated into the engine, but also uses all of the engines inner workings to function as well. Thus not only giving you a real-time preview of the shader itself, but also like I said before a shader that works without needing a programmer to clean it up. Anything short of making an Unreal type shader system is pretty pointless IMHO, but making something as good as Unreals would take a lot of hard work and effort.
#5
@Logan
The core problem is that Torque's ShaderGen is designed to split up features into smaller chunks to make it work on lower end systems. It is not designed to build up a shader by combining features. It sounds like semantics, but its an important distinction.
For instance. If you have an advanced shader 3.0 card that can do 16 textures in a pass and you have a material that blends 4 textures together... ShaderGen still builds 4 separate shaders. It has no concept of combining 4 BaseTexHLSLFeatures into a single shader. Yes it does understand adding a base, overlay, and detail texture into the same shader... but not repeating the same feature multiple times.
This is something i'm looking to remedy in beta 2 as i need it for doing ShaderGen terrain shaders, but i still don't anticipate it being ready for a drag and drop shader tool to be wrapped around it.
04/25/2009 (5:32 pm)
@Will - GuiTextureCanvas@Logan
The core problem is that Torque's ShaderGen is designed to split up features into smaller chunks to make it work on lower end systems. It is not designed to build up a shader by combining features. It sounds like semantics, but its an important distinction.
For instance. If you have an advanced shader 3.0 card that can do 16 textures in a pass and you have a material that blends 4 textures together... ShaderGen still builds 4 separate shaders. It has no concept of combining 4 BaseTexHLSLFeatures into a single shader. Yes it does understand adding a base, overlay, and detail texture into the same shader... but not repeating the same feature multiple times.
This is something i'm looking to remedy in beta 2 as i need it for doing ShaderGen terrain shaders, but i still don't anticipate it being ready for a drag and drop shader tool to be wrapped around it.
#6
That's cool and I certainly don't think its a necessary thing for T3D 1.0 release, more of a "sometime in the future" kind of thing. At the very least I am sure that if you guys know this kind of thing is needed it will help let you plan for its possibility in the future by getting the necessary backend updates done (like you guys are doing right now with a lot of the T3D stuff).
04/26/2009 (1:54 pm)
@TomThat's cool and I certainly don't think its a necessary thing for T3D 1.0 release, more of a "sometime in the future" kind of thing. At the very least I am sure that if you guys know this kind of thing is needed it will help let you plan for its possibility in the future by getting the necessary backend updates done (like you guys are doing right now with a lot of the T3D stuff).
Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
The shader generator in Torque 3D is an enhanced version of the one in TGEA which was originally designed back in 2004 or so. While it can do more its not really setup to make that sort of tool possible... although its fairly close to it.
I have another refactor of it for beta 2 to make it possible to use it for Terrain shaders, so i'll keep that in mind.