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Vertex Shader Tools As you will soon see, you are required to master a specific RISC-oriented assembly language to program vertex shaders, because using the vertex shader is taking responsibility for programming the geometry processor. Therefore, it is important to get the right tools to begin to develop shaders as quickly and productivly as possible. I would like to present the tools that I am aware of at the time of this writing. NVIDIA Effects Browser 2/3 NVIDIA provides their own DirectX 8 SDK, that encapsulates all their tools, demos and presentations on DirectX 8.0. All the demos use a consistent framework called Effects Browser. Figure 2 - NVIDIA Effects Browser The Effects Browser is a wonderful tool to test and develop vertex and pixel shaders. You can select the effect you would like to see in the left column. The middle column gives you the ability to see the source of the vertex and/or pixel shader. The right column displays the effect. Not all graphics cards will support all the effects available in the Effects Browser. GeForce3/4TI will support all the effects. Independent of your current graphic card preferences, I recommend downloading the NVIDIA DirectX 8 SDK and trying it out. The many examples, including detailed explanations, show you a variety of the effects possible with vertex and pixel shaders. The upcoming NVIDIA EffectsBrowser 3 will provide automatic online update capabilities. NVIDIA Shader Debugger Once you have used it, you won't live without it. The NVIDIA shader debugger provides you with information about the current state of the temporary registers, the input streams, the output registers, and the constant memory. This data changes interactively while stepping through the shaders. It is also possible to set instruction breakpoints as well as specific breakpoint. Figure 3- NVIDIA Shader Debugger A user manual that explains all the possible features is provided. You need at least Windows 2000 with Service Pack 1 to run the Shader Debugger because debug services in DX8 and DX8.1 are only supplied in Windows 2000 and higher. It is important that your application use software vertex processing (or you have switched to the reference rasterizer) in the runtime for the debugging process. You are also able to debug pixel shaders with this debugger, but due to a bug in DirectX 8.0 the contents of t0 are never displayed correctly and user-added pixel shader breakpoints will not trigger. DirectX 8.1 fixes these issues and you receive a varning message if the application finds an installation of DirectX 8.0. Shader City You can find another vertex and pixel shader tool, along with source code at http://www.palevich.com/3d/ShaderCity/. Designed and implemented by Jack Palevich, Shader City allows you to see any modification of the vertex and/or pixel shaders in the small client window in the left upper edge: Figure 4 - Jack Palevich Shader City The results of a modification of a vertex and/or pixel shader can be seen after they are saved and re-loaded. Besides your are able to load index and vertex buffers from a file. The source code for this tool might help you to encapsulate Direct3D in an ActiveX control ... so try it. Vertex Shader Assembler To compile a vertex shader ASCII file (for example basic.vsh) into a binary file (for example basic.vso), you must use a vertex shader assembler. As far as I know, there are two vertex shader assemblers: the Microsoft vertex shader assembler and the NVIDIA vertex and pixel shader macro assembler. The latter provides all of the features of the Vertex Shader Assembler plus many other features, whereas the Vertex Shader Assembler gives you the ability to also use the D3DX effect files (as of DirectX 8.1). NVIDIA NVASM - Vertex and Pixel Shader Macro Assembler NVIDIA provides its Vertex and Pixel Shader Macro Assembler as part of their DirectX 8 SDK. NVASM has very robust error reporting built into it. It will not only tell you what line the error was on, it is also able to back track errors. Good documentation helps you get started. NVASM was written by ShaderX author Kenneth Hurley, who provides additional information in his ShaderX article [Hurley]. We will learn how to use this tool in one of the upcoming examples in the next chapter. Microsoft Vertex Shader Assembler The Microsoft vertex shader assembler is delivered in the DirectX 8.1 SDK in C:\dxsdk\bin\DXUtils Note: The default path of the DirectX 8 SDK is c:\mssdk. The default path of DirectX 8.1 SDK is c:\dxsdk. If you call vsa.exe from the command line, you will get the following options: usage: vsa -hp012 <files> -h : Generate .h files (instead of .vso files) -p : Use C preprocessor (VisualC++ required) -0 : Debug info omitted, no shader validation performed -1 : Debug info inserted, no shader validation performed -2 : Debug info inserted, shader validation performed. (default) I haven't found any documentation for the Vertex Shader Assembler. It is used by the D3DXAssembleShader*() methods or by the effect file method D3DXCreateEffectFromFile(), that compiles the effect file. If you want to be hardware-vendor independent you should use the Microsoft Vertex Shader Assembler. Shader Studio ShaderX author John Schwab has developed a tool that will greatly aid in your development of vertex and pixel shaders. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced Direct3D programmer this tool will save you a lot of time, it will allow you to get right down to development of any shader without actually writing any Direct3D code. Therefore you can spend your precious time working on what's important, the shaders. Figure 5 - John Schwab's Shader Studio: Phong Lighting The tool encapsulates a complete vertex and pixel shader engine with a few nice ideas. For a hand on tutorial and detailed explainations see [Schwab]. The newest version should be available online at www.shaderstudio.com. NVLink 2.x NVLink is a very interesting tool, that allows you to: Write vertex shaders that consists of "fragments" with #beginfragment and the #endfragment statements. For example: #beginfragment world_transform dp4 r_worldpos.x, v_position, c_world0 dp3 r_worldpos.y, v_position, c_world1 dp4 r_worldpos.z, v_position, c_world2 #endfragment Assemble vertex shader files with NVASM into "fragments" Link those fragments to produce a binary vertex shader at run-time NVLink helps you to generate shaders on demand that will fit into the end-users hardware limits (registers/instructions/constants). The most attractive feature of this tool is that it will cache and optimize your shaders on the fly. NVLink is shown in the NVEffects Browser: Figure 6 - NVLink You can choose the vertex shader capabilities in the dialog box and the resulting vertex shader will be shown in output0.nvv in the middle column. Note: the NVLink 2.x example shows the implementation of the fixed-function pipeline in a vertex shader. NVIDIA Photoshop PlugIns You will find on NVIDIA's web-site two frequently updated plugin's for Adobe Photoshop. NVIDIA's Normal Map Generator and Photoshop compression plug in. The Normal Map Generator can generate normal maps that can be used, for example, for Dot3 lighting. Figure 7 - NVIDIA Normal Map Generator The plugin requires DirectX 8.0 or later to be installed. The dynamic preview window, located in the upper left corner, shows an example light that is moved with the CTRL + left-mouse-button. You are able to clamp or wrap the edges of the generated normal map by selecting or deselecting the wrap check box. The height values of the normal map can be scaled by providing a height value in the Scale entry field. There are different options for height generation: ALPHA - use alpha channel AVERAGE_RGB = average R, G, B BIASED_RGB - h = average (R, G, B) - average of whole image RED - use red channel GREEN - use green channel BLUE - use blue channel MAX - use max of R, G, B COLORSPACE,  h = 1.0 - [(1.0 - r) * (1.0 - g) * (1.0 - b)] This plugin also works with layers. The readme.txt file provides you with more information about its features. Another Adobe Photoshop plugin provided by NVIDIA is the Photoshop Compression Plugin. It is used by choosing <Save As> in Adobe Photoshop and then the <DDS> file format. The following dialog provides a wide variety of features: Figure 8 - NVIDIA Compression Plugin A 3D preview shows the different quality levels that result from different compression formats. This tool can additionally generate mip-maps and convert a height map to a normal map. The provided readme file is very instructive and explains all of the hundreds of features of this tool. As the name implies, both tools support Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and higher.  Diffusion Cubemap Tool ShaderX author Kenneth Hurley wrote a tool, that helps you producing diffusion cube maps. It aids in extraction of cube maps from digital pictures. The pictures are of a completely reflective ball. The program also allows you to draw an exclusion rectangle to remove the picture taker from the cube map. To extract the reflection maps first load in the picture and then use the mouse to draw the ellipse enclosed in a rectangle. This rectangle should be stretched and moved so that the ellipse falls on the edges of the ball. Then set which direction is associated with the picture in the menu options. The following screenshots use the Negative X and Negative Z direction:             Figure 9 - Negative X Sphere Picture Figure 10 - Negative Z Sphere Picture The Cube maps are generated with the "Generate" menu option. The program, the source code and much more information can be found at [Hurley]. DLL Detective with Direct3D Plugin ShaderX author Ádám Moravánszky wrote a tool called DLL Detective. It is not only very useful as a performance analysis tool but also for vertex and pixel shader programming: Figure 11 - Ádám Moravánszky's DLL Detective It is able to intercept vertex and pixel shaders, disassemble and write them into a file. A lot of different graphs show the usage of the Direct3D API under different conditions and help to find performance leaks this way. You can even suppress API calls to simulate other conditions. To impede the parallelism of the CPU and GPU usage, you can lock the rendertarget buffer. DLL Detective is especially suited to instrumenting games, or any other applications which run in fullscreen mode, preventing easy access to other windows (like DLL Detective, for example). To instrument such programs, DLL Detective can be configured to control instrumentation via a multimonitor setup, and even from another PC over a network. The full source code and compiled binaries can be downloaded from the web-site of the author at http://n.ethz.ch/student/adammo/DLLDetective/index.html. 3D Studio MAX 4.x / gmax 1.1 The new 3D Studio MAX 4.x gives a graphic artist the ability to produce vertex shader code and pixel shader code while producing the models and animations. Figure 12 - 3D Studio Max 4.x/gmax 1.1 A WYSIWYG view of your work will appear by displaying multitextures, true transparency, opacity mapping, and the results of custom pixel and vertex shaders. gmax as a derivative of 3D Studio Max 4.x does support vertex and pixel shader programming. However, the gmax free product provides no user interface to access or edit these controls. Find more information at discreet. Vertex Shader Architecture

Contents   Introduction   Vertex Shaders in the Pipeline   Vertex Shader Tools   Vertex Shader Architecture   High Level View of Vertex Shader Programming   Conclusion   Printable version   Discuss this article The Series   Fundamentals of Vertex Shaders   Programming Vertex Shaders   Fundamentals of Pixel Shaders   Programming Pixel Shaders   Diffuse & Specular Lighting with Pixel Shaders