Friday, November 1, 2013

Shaders and Pipeline

Yesterday was a bit of a distraction with Halloween, and hardware upgrades gone awry (not to my PC, my PC is still sufficiently awesome).  That's all dealt with, so back to some real work today.

I was still unhappy with the way materials and shaders were coming out of the pipeline, so I spent most of today cleaning all of that up.  It makes it quite a bit easier to modify specific shader parameters on specific materials, which I really need.

The main problem is that when I converted the shaders to the shader node / graph system, I was basically baking the shader constant values directly into the shader.  This basically meant there was one shader compiled for every material on every mesh.  On one hand, this wasn't so bad, because I don't have that many models really.  On the other, it's just awful.  :)  So, I put in proper shader sharing within a single model and added material / shader constant blocks that are set (and potentially modified) at runtime.

That's coming along well.  There is maybe a little cleanup required, and a few game-side functions to add to access the material data in a friendlier fashion, but that should all be done by the end of the weekend.

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