Re: [Opensg-users] The times they are a'changing...

[Rasmus A. <ra...@vr...>]

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 19:48, Michael Babcock wrote:
> Dirk Reiners wrote:
> >>Anyway, just some thoughts. I agree that supporting vertex/fragment 
> >>programming in a convenient way is a very important feature right now.
> > 
> > 
> > Are your artists using Shaders in Maya yet? Do you have decent access to
> > them, so that you could export them?
> 
> No, in fact this is the main issue I'm struggling with. At the moment 
> I'm just converting the standard (non-realtime) Maya materials to the 
> standard OpenGL material (SimpleTextured). I want to allow the artist to 
> specify a particular custom realtime shader for a set of faces in Maya, 
> and tweak the shader-specific parameters from there. Then the exporter 
> would use that shader and wire up all the proper parameters at runtime. 
> Otherwise it would seem I'd need to create a custom OpenSG Material for 
> each programmable shader to expose its parameters.
> 
> Because OpenSG has reflection of FieldContainers and Fields, it should 
> be possible to dynamically expose the custom vp/fp parameters at runtime.

I have a similar feeling ;-)

> 
> Nvidia has a CgFX format that specifies some semantics for parameters, 
> as well as a Maya plugin to use it, but it seems both the plugin and 
> CgFX runtime is currently only available for Windows (we're using Linux).
> 

Nvidia has released the Cg Toolkit, which includes both the Cg compiler
and the Cg runtime, for linux as well. So it is possible to use the CgFX
file format, which by the way is compatible with MS HLSL format. I have
successfully compiled/run a few examples on my Radeon 9700 linux box.

Just a comment :-)

/Rasmus

-- 
Rasmus Agerholm <ra...@vr...>
VR Media Lab