ShaderFX, Fresh From the Oven
by Logan Foster · 11/28/2006 (10:37 pm) · 21 comments
Today marks a pretty important day with regards to tools development and the creation FX format shader files for both indie and AAA game developers. Why is that? Well a fantastic tool that has been in development below the radar has finally been released to the general public to mass consume. That tool is ShaderFX!
Why am I so excited about a tool I have had 0 involvement in creating, and why should you be excited too? The answer is quite simple, a tool like this hasn't existed on the market for well over a year (not since RTZen/Ginza was bought out and taken away by Havok). ShaderFX finally delivers what every artist has needed, a visual schematic shader generation tool that allows us to setup various pixel shader effects with ease. Be it the need to create an effect to show your programmer what you want, or to go all the way with creating a DXSAS standard FX file for your game (unfortunately this will mean you will need to massage the FX files a bit to get them into TGEA).
The tool is well worth checking out and IMHO well worth the investment price as well to get a gem like this. Remember, good tools help make the creation of good games a hell of a lot easier.
Note: For those artists out there who are looking to learn more about shader creation. CGAcademy will soon have available a HLSL Shader Training DVD (announcement post link) from one of the guys who created ShaderFX. Likely another great addition to pickup when its released.
edit: fixed image tag
Why am I so excited about a tool I have had 0 involvement in creating, and why should you be excited too? The answer is quite simple, a tool like this hasn't existed on the market for well over a year (not since RTZen/Ginza was bought out and taken away by Havok). ShaderFX finally delivers what every artist has needed, a visual schematic shader generation tool that allows us to setup various pixel shader effects with ease. Be it the need to create an effect to show your programmer what you want, or to go all the way with creating a DXSAS standard FX file for your game (unfortunately this will mean you will need to massage the FX files a bit to get them into TGEA).
The tool is well worth checking out and IMHO well worth the investment price as well to get a gem like this. Remember, good tools help make the creation of good games a hell of a lot easier.
Note: For those artists out there who are looking to learn more about shader creation. CGAcademy will soon have available a HLSL Shader Training DVD (announcement post link) from one of the guys who created ShaderFX. Likely another great addition to pickup when its released.
edit: fixed image tag
About the author
#2
"Built right into 3ds Max, it offers a gradual learning curve to .fx shaders for artists who are used to the 3ds Max material editor."
Getting 3ds Max ($3495) and ShaderFX ($249) will rob you of $3744 for a single license. :)
How much money does the regular indie actually spend on the toolset ? I tought spending $495 on XSI was alot of cash to part with, maybe I'm just cheap?
Wouldn't it be great to have such a thing as an stand-alone tool to TGEA ? Like ShowTool PRO :)
11/28/2006 (11:55 pm)
hmm, I'd love such an tool, RTZen looked like a dream come true until they pulled the plug, but:"Built right into 3ds Max, it offers a gradual learning curve to .fx shaders for artists who are used to the 3ds Max material editor."
Getting 3ds Max ($3495) and ShaderFX ($249) will rob you of $3744 for a single license. :)
How much money does the regular indie actually spend on the toolset ? I tought spending $495 on XSI was alot of cash to part with, maybe I'm just cheap?
Wouldn't it be great to have such a thing as an stand-alone tool to TGEA ? Like ShowTool PRO :)
#3
ATI's Render Monkey
NVidia's CGFX
and...CG Tookit
11/29/2006 (2:48 am)
I've found these FREE! ones... ATI's Render Monkey
NVidia's CGFX
and...CG Tookit
#4
But yeah, this looks really good.
11/29/2006 (3:09 am)
dont forget the fact that this is 250 bucks compared to the 1000+ of rtZen :)But yeah, this looks really good.
#5
11/29/2006 (4:40 am)
This is very cool. As a non MAX user, I would love to see this as a standalone tool. Keep up the good work.
#6
11/29/2006 (5:48 am)
Thanks for passing this news along, Logan. 
#7
11/29/2006 (7:06 am)
Really cool, just not something I would be able to afford.
#8
This tool looks cool also, but has a steep price (AKA not free).
11/29/2006 (7:37 am)
Render monkey is nice.This tool looks cool also, but has a steep price (AKA not free).
#10
11/29/2006 (8:10 am)
Nice tool. Would like to see something put into or built off Torque Showtool Pro that would let us play with shader materials like that.
#11
You bring up an interesting point here with regards to "indie" developers and tools, a discussion that I will break down into two seperate parts, tools themselves and the indie preception or mispreception of costs.
Tools
Tools are designed to make our work easier to do. They take tasks that were very difficult, mundane or complicated and allow us to do them in a fraction of the time. So what exactly makes a good tool? Well as my friend Don Moar (former tools lead at Bioware) put it, good tools are those that save you man hours, if the man hours saved >= the time it would take normally, then the tool is worth making or purchasing.
As such with ShaderFX, yes it does cost $250 bucks, but if one artist can create all the shader effects that you need and allow your programmers to work on the core game or fixing bugs, how much does that save you? If an artist can prototype shaders and pass them off to a programmer to tweak, having the programmer spend only a tenth of time normally needed to make the same shader, is it not worthwhile?
Cost
This is a real pet peeve of mine (I've already bitch about it in a blog if you are curious), so don't think that it is directed at you or anyone else here in this community. Cost is irrelivent.
Games cost money to make, sure you can get by by purchasing low-end tools that are cheap and more affordable for your budget, but sooner or later that will come to bite you in the ass. Why? Well just look back at the tools comments above. Generally, the more expensive tools allow you to do additional features or options not availble in the cheaper ones. Yes you can still do the same work with a freeware app like Blender and a high end app like Max, Maya, LW or XSI but what is important are the man hours that you spend doing it. If it takes you 2x or 3x as long to do the same work, you are not saving money, you are losing money, especially over the course of a project. I don't care if you are doing this as a hobby, volunteer or paid work, the simple fact is that your time is a valuable commodity and should be treated as such.
11/29/2006 (9:30 am)
@Jorgen,You bring up an interesting point here with regards to "indie" developers and tools, a discussion that I will break down into two seperate parts, tools themselves and the indie preception or mispreception of costs.
Tools
Tools are designed to make our work easier to do. They take tasks that were very difficult, mundane or complicated and allow us to do them in a fraction of the time. So what exactly makes a good tool? Well as my friend Don Moar (former tools lead at Bioware) put it, good tools are those that save you man hours, if the man hours saved >= the time it would take normally, then the tool is worth making or purchasing.
As such with ShaderFX, yes it does cost $250 bucks, but if one artist can create all the shader effects that you need and allow your programmers to work on the core game or fixing bugs, how much does that save you? If an artist can prototype shaders and pass them off to a programmer to tweak, having the programmer spend only a tenth of time normally needed to make the same shader, is it not worthwhile?
Cost
This is a real pet peeve of mine (I've already bitch about it in a blog if you are curious), so don't think that it is directed at you or anyone else here in this community. Cost is irrelivent.
Games cost money to make, sure you can get by by purchasing low-end tools that are cheap and more affordable for your budget, but sooner or later that will come to bite you in the ass. Why? Well just look back at the tools comments above. Generally, the more expensive tools allow you to do additional features or options not availble in the cheaper ones. Yes you can still do the same work with a freeware app like Blender and a high end app like Max, Maya, LW or XSI but what is important are the man hours that you spend doing it. If it takes you 2x or 3x as long to do the same work, you are not saving money, you are losing money, especially over the course of a project. I don't care if you are doing this as a hobby, volunteer or paid work, the simple fact is that your time is a valuable commodity and should be treated as such.
#12
11/29/2006 (11:39 am)
That looks interesting...thanks for posting.
#13
I'm more concerned with what happens when you've got artists all doing their own thing and going wild with shaders when they may have no idea what sort of performance hit a double layer normal mapped with parallax mapping and multicolored selective specular mapping over top of a dynamic cube map that gets a hit of perlin noise a turbulent effect and then some gaussian blurring followed by edge detection is going to have.
May not be a universal problem but I find that you generally have to tell artists to not be artists and every time they have to go back and redo or reduce something that's time lost. Perhaps a means to place constraints on the program would be helpful so that a naive artist can't overwhelm the GPU.
11/29/2006 (1:54 pm)
Interesting, seems handy. I'm more concerned with what happens when you've got artists all doing their own thing and going wild with shaders when they may have no idea what sort of performance hit a double layer normal mapped with parallax mapping and multicolored selective specular mapping over top of a dynamic cube map that gets a hit of perlin noise a turbulent effect and then some gaussian blurring followed by edge detection is going to have.
May not be a universal problem but I find that you generally have to tell artists to not be artists and every time they have to go back and redo or reduce something that's time lost. Perhaps a means to place constraints on the program would be helpful so that a naive artist can't overwhelm the GPU.
#14
11/29/2006 (5:27 pm)
Looks alot like the Render Tree in XSI! :P 
#15
11/30/2006 (3:28 pm)
Why did they build a new editor, Max already has a fine material editor...we just needed real time feedback.
#16
11/30/2006 (7:59 pm)
It's not only for MAX, its for any kind of shader. I guess it just has special compatibility features for max. 
#17
Also, any artists here used ShaderFX much since it's release? I just attended my third GDC lecture on shader creation... all of which have left me still pretty confused (even though they were in the Visual Artists track). I'm sure for programmers this stuff is a piece of cake, but I'm still waiting for those artist-friendly shader creation tools. Is ShaderFX it?
And Jonathan, if you don't mind me saying so, I think you are underestimating artists a little here. While we may not understand precisely why building a complex shader would be such a performance hit, it's well within our capabilities to understand that it would be a relevant performance hit, and to stay away from something too complex. Yes, we artists look to coders for guidelines on issues like this... at least the artists you're working with should be doing that preemptively, and not after the fact.
03/12/2007 (1:58 pm)
Just noticed the CG Academy DVD is out. A "Fundamentals" DVD at the "Advanced" level? :SAlso, any artists here used ShaderFX much since it's release? I just attended my third GDC lecture on shader creation... all of which have left me still pretty confused (even though they were in the Visual Artists track). I'm sure for programmers this stuff is a piece of cake, but I'm still waiting for those artist-friendly shader creation tools. Is ShaderFX it?
And Jonathan, if you don't mind me saying so, I think you are underestimating artists a little here. While we may not understand precisely why building a complex shader would be such a performance hit, it's well within our capabilities to understand that it would be a relevant performance hit, and to stay away from something too complex. Yes, we artists look to coders for guidelines on issues like this... at least the artists you're working with should be doing that preemptively, and not after the fact.
#18
03/12/2007 (3:20 pm)
REMOVED
#19
03/12/2007 (4:08 pm)
Looking forward to it! :)
#20
I don't agree with Jonathan Sandusky, Artists are like everyone else, you get good ones and bad ones. I'm sure anyone with an ounce of common sense will soon scale back their ambition with shaders once they have experimented with them a bit on a variety of hardware.
Only been using shaderFX a short time, and since I'm an Ogre user, there is an extra conversion process to get the shader to play nice with ogres material system. the results are quite stunning.
ShaderFX 1.5x is a big step up from the original release and offers a lot more flexibility than I had expected. I also tried Mental Mill, and shader FX code is far cleaner and well commented, allowing you to quickly follow whats going on. The code also includes a lot of UI stuff thats kind of annoying.
If your engine loads shaders created with FX composer, theres a good chance that the shaderFX materials will simply work out of the box. It supports Microsofts DXSAS FX format now too.
Much more powerful than 3dsmax built in shader creation, and you get to choose which shader model you wish to support too.
07/01/2007 (12:02 pm)
ShaderFX is the best shader creation tool I have used. I really like it a lot. I don't agree with Jonathan Sandusky, Artists are like everyone else, you get good ones and bad ones. I'm sure anyone with an ounce of common sense will soon scale back their ambition with shaders once they have experimented with them a bit on a variety of hardware.
Only been using shaderFX a short time, and since I'm an Ogre user, there is an extra conversion process to get the shader to play nice with ogres material system. the results are quite stunning.
ShaderFX 1.5x is a big step up from the original release and offers a lot more flexibility than I had expected. I also tried Mental Mill, and shader FX code is far cleaner and well commented, allowing you to quickly follow whats going on. The code also includes a lot of UI stuff thats kind of annoying.
If your engine loads shaders created with FX composer, theres a good chance that the shaderFX materials will simply work out of the box. It supports Microsofts DXSAS FX format now too.
Much more powerful than 3dsmax built in shader creation, and you get to choose which shader model you wish to support too.
Associate David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
Now, if we could get more tools to be so intuitive...