I think Ashli is amazing, but its lack of an SDK retards its usability except as an isolated demo; something this cool deserves to be more than a novelty toy. So I reverse-engineered the header files and created an impostor ashli.dll to find out how it’s used (impostoring a C++ class was fun to learn how to do). The result is an application that uses ashli.dll to create its shaders from RenderMan source and then displays them.
I’m not done; I want it to be easy as pie to use this in your own projects, I haven’t explored many aspects, there’s no support for multi-passing, I need to document all the information I’ve gleaned, and I’d like to support scene files. Consider this an early adopter kit.
Distributing the DLL and using it in this fashion is allowed by ATI’s license. Just give credit to ATI where it’s due.
Here’s the file: Ashli SDK