Design And Implementation Of Visual Programming System For Material Shading

With the development of computer graphics and the growing ability of the commercial graphics cards, the game industry has experienced tremendous growth. And the rendering quality of game products are better and better. Elaborately made materials and complex illumination calculation make a vivid image. But it is really a hard work to edit and manage a large number of materials. If you just code all shaders into the game engine or the game project, easy it seems but a quantity of problems will arise. This can make a tight coupling relationship among the codes, the art assets and shaders. Meanwhile the coupling working style of developing shader materials between artists, who lack of programming knowledge, and programmers, who cannot create art assets, is to slower game development pace.In order to solve this problem, this article introduces a visual programming system for material programming. Integrated to game engines or game projects, the visual programming system, which is easy to use, is a good solution for the artists.The system in this article consists of four independent modules. The visual programming GUI module and automatic shading sub-system(ASS) are the core modules of the system. The visual programming GUI is users’ interface, while the ASS generates shader codes in the base of Shader Tree. And the GUI rendering module is designed to support multiple graphics API, while the D3D preview module show the shader effect in a window. The VMSPS is programmed by using MFC and DirectX SDK (June2010), under the Visual Studio2010IDE.The realization of the VMSPS shall make the coupling between programmers and artists looser, as well as between the shader programs and art assets.