shiny - a shader and material management library [v 0.3]

[efaj]

Also, I'm currently in the planning stage of adding a realtime material editor in QT. It won't be a standalone application, but instead will be available from a simple 1 line call in the user's application, which will open an editing window. That way, all editing will have an immediate visual effect on the game window without a restart.

I know QT is pretty standard, but, IIRC, it's a huge dependency to add. "It won't be a standalone application", but the rest of the library won't need QT, right? Can this be implemented in a way we can just comment that line/remove a folder to remove/avoid the QT dependency?
Other than that, this sounds incredibly awesome.

[scrawl]

Yes, of course. Thanks to CMake, we can even disable the editing component automatically if QT isn't found.

[greendogo]

Hey Scrawl, the material editor sounds really cool (I saw SirHerrbatka mention it in the weekly update at OpenMW.org). Just wondering, but will this be something we'll be able to access in-game through the console? Or is this more intended for the CS?

[scrawl]

@greendogo: It can be added to any application that already uses shiny. So eventually it should be in both.

@all: Here's what I've been working on today. It's a terrain material generator that supports an arbitrary number of layers by creating more passes if needed.
It's pretty straightforward as you can see: .hpp .cpp .shader
Edit: updated dead link
Edit2: updated link again

The main trick is to use depth_func equal for all passes except the first to prevent depth fighting. Also be careful to use the correct blendmap components, as blendmaps might be shared between passes if the number of layers per pass is not a multiple of 4.

The editor is coming along nicely, but I'm also working on other stuff at the same time so it could take a while.

[pinaster]

nice work! these screenshots looks totally like Morrowind

[Nauk]

@greendogo: It can be added to any application that already uses shiny. So eventually it should be in both.

@all: Here's what I've been working on today. It's a terrain material generator that supports an arbitrary number of layers by creating more passes if needed.
It's pretty straightforward as you can see: .hpp .cpp .shader
The main trick is to use depth_func equal for all passes except the first to prevent depth fighting. Also be careful to use the correct blendmap components, as blendmaps might be shared between passes if the number of layers per pass is not a multiple of 4.

The editor is coming along nicely, but I'm also working on other stuff at the same time so it could take a while.

Thanks for that

[scrawl]

Hi guys,

about time to write an update.

a few minor fixes and improvements have been pushed to github (version 0.3), make sure to update if you haven't.

The material editor is in a usable state. Some minor features are missing, but it works perfectly for real-time material tweaking and saving the results to the material file.
I thought I had posted a screenshot before in this topic, but can't find it now (I must be getting old). So here's one:


In other news, dark_sylinc is creating a new high level material system for direct inclusion in Ogre 2.0, which includes many features and concepts found in shiny. You can follow his progress in the v2-0-AZDO-Hlms branch (very bleeding edge!). A high-level overview of the system can be found in my initial draft (some terminology and minor details have changed, but it still gives you a good overview).

Finally, there's now a donation button on my new website. If you've found shiny useful you can support me this way.

[paroj]

since scrawl deleted his github account, I scavenged github for some only mildly outdated fork, and made it compile with 1.12:
https://github.com/OGRECave/shiny

could be useful as some projects still use this.