Interactive shader development

Abstract

Since the introduction of programmable graphics hardware, the creation of shader programs has played an increasingly important role in real-time graphics. Programming shaders is no trivial task, and this has led to the introduction of graphical shader editor tools. Using these tools, shaders are authored by connecting nodes and building a shade tree.In this paper we present an improved approach to real-time graphical shader authoring that removes several programming difficulties. Our approach automatically handles type-and geometrical space transformations by using intelligent variables as connection slots in the nodes. Our work also offers workflow enhancements for a more interactive creation process. When shaders are to be used in interactive applications such as games, they need to be optimized. Therefore we present a scheme for automatic optimization in two steps; first optimal code placement and second optimization of inserted transformations. Performance will be compared to hand-optimized programs.