Writing a Custom Material

If none of the HOOPS Luminate built-in materials (Using Built-in HOOPS Luminate Materials) suit you or if you want to create your own specific effects, the following pages are written for you. HOOPS Luminate is very flexible concerning material and shader programming and support a full range of customization from totally built-in materials to totally custom shaders either for GPU rendering or software shading.

A RED::IMaterial is composed of shaders (as explained in The Shading Pipeline).

This part of the book covers the following topics:

• Using Built-in Render Shaders: The first easiest way to built a custom material is by using the HOOPS Luminate built-in render shaders. The chapter gives a list of all of them.

• Writing Custom Render Shaders: If none of the predefined shaders is adapted to your needs, the second choice is to write your own render shaders. The page explains how to do it in GPU and in software.

• Configuring a Render Shader Using a State Shader: After reading this chapter you will be able to use a state shader to configure your shading pipeline. It describes the several functions of the RED::StateShader object.

• Default Pass Startup State Shader Configurations: Lists the default state shader blending and depth modes for each material pass.

• Defining Shader Programs by Hardware Platform: This page defines the concept of hardware platform configurations for shaders.