Implementação de um editor visual para a criação de shaders

Abstract

Shaders are programs used to define the rendering pipeline of the graphics hardware. Thus it becomes possible to create applications that have more sophisticated visual effects and run faster on the favorable GPU’s architecture. Shaders can be written in several languages, for both offline rendering and real-time applications. A common characteristic of shader languages is that they avoid the concepts the general purpose languages have to make programming easier, such as encapsulation and abstraction, moving the program’s logic close to the hardware characteristics. This fact also complicates the work of programmers and graphic artists of software development teams, as the artists design the visual effects, but need to wait for programmers to implement them. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a visual editor that artists can use to design the desired visual effects and generate the code for the shader in GLSL. The edition of shaders will be based on the connection of nodes in order to create na acyclic graph. Nodes that represent texture maps and color blending operations are used to define characteristics of the visual effect implemented by the shaders. This way, it’s possible to implement shaders without the knowledge of programming and mathematics concepts inherent to them.