Daily Writing Tips. Sharing Pedagogical Purposes. Scientific Ninja Bookmark. Recently, I started working on a visual shader construction tool; something along the lines of the Unreal material editor, the now-unavailable ShaderWorks, and the visual render path tools present in modeling packages like Maya and Blender.
I also borrowed heavily from some concepts presented in Morgan McGuire’s “Abstract Shade Trees” paper. Such tools are uncommon. Unreal’s tool is available only to those with an Unreal Engine license; other studios, such as the Project Offset team, Activision, and Snowblind Studios have tools that are proprietary. McGuire’s paper does not provide a demonstration application. Essentially, there are few such tools available to the public, although they are becoming more prevalent (FX Composer 2, for example, now includes such a tool). What Games Are. ScienceBlogs.