mentalmill and TV3D

[Icare]

Hi !

I only started studying shader with TV3D, and I found this tool that allows to model shaders not write.
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-mill/documents/mental-mill-video-tutorial.html

It can export in HLSL.

Have you ever tried this soft ?

Nicolas

[sybixsus]

I tried it. It's similar to ShaderFX, except that it's not tied to 3dsMax. The shaders it produces are not terribly optimized, but they do their job, so if you haven't learned HLSL, it's a good alternative. The resulting shaders should be pretty compatible with TV3D. So long as they don't use any Nvidia specific stuff like their S24D8 buffers and that sort of thing, they should work without any changes. Well, apart from adding in the TV-specific semantics to replace the Nvidia-specific ones, but that's childsplay.

[jviper]

hmmm.....sucks mental mills doesn't work on my system. It's basically saying that my card must be an NVIDIA card.

[Icare]

I have an ATI HD4850 and it's working on my computer.

Where Can I find some documentation about the transformation an how works shader with TV3D ?

Nicolas

[sybixsus]

If you check this page:

http://www.truevision3d.com/forums/shader_development/shader_faq-t6277.0.html

Sylvain lists some of the semantics towards the top. If memory serves, not all the semantics are there, so if you can't find the one you need, you may need to read the rest of the thread, as I think other semantics are mentioned on later pages.

[Zaknafein]

A fully up-to-date semantic list is over there : http://wiki.truevision3d.com/tutorialsarticlesandexamples/programming_hlsl_shaders2#semantic_types

[Lenn]

I found mental mill very useful! Thank you!

It had "templates" (nodes) for things I couldn't find good tutorials on, and I always learn best from examples. It helped a lot.

[Lenn]

Oh and, if somebody needs a shader useful for buildings with glass windows, I can upload it.

It makes certain areas (ie windows, itensity map taken from an alpha map) reflect a given cube map, so you can map how reflective certain areas are.

A few others, i'm not so sure about how well they will work, but mental mill has given me sooo many ideas! It's like messing around with photoshop and discovering things! The boring part of getting the basis of the HLSL code with which I can later fiddle is removed by this app, so I'm probably going to do a lot.

[Cassius]

Oh and, if somebody needs a shader useful for buildings with glass windows, I can upload it.

It makes certain areas (ie windows, itensity map taken from an alpha map) reflect a given cube map, so you can map how reflective certain areas are.

Yes please

[Lenn]

Ok, i'll post a sample "soon" 

[beyonder]

I could really use a glass shader too... been looking everywhere on the forum. All links are dead... 

[Lenn]

I'll post it as soon as I can. I'm busy with many things, and I don't do anything half-way (i want to post a sample which might include other examples too). So in about 10-15 days.