a GUI for writing shaders

Hi,

I have been working on this pet project. Seeing as how there is a few out there for D3D, but nothing good for GL (at least not yet), I created this.

This is an early version. It’s not complete yet!
If you are interested and you work with shaders, then download it and go through the tutorial to see if it’s working on your machine.

Be sure to read everything before poking around randomly, cause you might make it crash.

http://ee.1asphost.com/vmelkon/projecta.html

PS: If that server blows a fuse, let me know. :slight_smile:

Enjoy!

that looks like a cool project, thx for sharing and good luck on it :slight_smile:

but nothing good for GL (at least not yet)
This isn’t a “shader” building tool, as in an editor for shader files. It’s a tool for building effects files. It’s used for taking one or more shaders and combining them with textures to produce a particular effect.

The OpenGL Shader Designer is “a GUI for writing shaders”. This is a really nice tool.

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that your tool isn’t useful. It’s just useful in a different way. But, considering that it cannot edit shaders, it can’t really be called a “a GUI for writing shaders”. It’s an effects GUI.

BTW, is there a corresponding effects-file runtime? I mean, how is the user expected to use the output from this program?

Thanks for the comments.

Korval, you can edit shaders. My tutorial doesn’t specifically instruct you to edit shaders, but like it says “it has a VC++ IDE like editor”. Text hilighting, commenting hilighting, word autocomplete (Ctrl+Space)

When you create a “Shader Set Node”, and then open the dialog box by double clicking on it, you will see that there are a few buttons there :

“Set”, “Edit”, “Clear”, “Open”

Press on Edit. Also, you can load “Free form”

From the main menu :
Shader Set -> Open FreeForm

and you can edit some shaders that are not part of the workspace.

There are other things you can try. It’s intended to allow a high degree of flexibility.
The idea is to have 100% control on GL.

Here is a quick idea.
Can you load some 3D object, and then split the preview into 3 sections :“Front View”, “Side View”, and “ISO view”.
It’s possible with this version.

I will shortly update to fix a slight bug that was introduced in the release version that prevented the creation of p-buffer textures.

BTW, is there a corresponding effects-file runtime? I mean, how is the user expected to use the output from this program?
As Shrek said “It’s on my todo list”

Thanks again for taking a look.