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One of the new features in Unity 3.0 is the new Shader Language they’ve created called ‘Surface Shaders’.  Given the historical complaints of many having to learn the multitude of shader languages and making them work in the many different rendering models, they’ve decided to write their own much simpler language.  A new blog post on their site shows what you can do with the new system.

Over a year ago I had a thought that “Shaders must die”. And what do you know – turns out we’re doing this in Unity 3. We call this Surface Shaders cause I’ve a suspicion “shaders must die” as a feature name wouldn’t have flied very far.

via Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Unity 3 technology – Surface Shaders.

Science shader, unity

The r|shaders pack from Core Zero brings some beautiful procedural shaders to 3ds Max, and has just enetered Beta 1.5.  In addition to this milestone, they are running a promotional 50% discount sale through February and March in preparation for release soon afterwards.

Currently 7 shaders are operational (ice, ocean, deep ocean, sand, snow, ice land, and snow land) with 2 more to come prior to release (magma and ground).  The results are amazing, and their website has detailed examples of both the UI and results for each shader.

Core Zero Home.

Graphics 3dsmax, plugin, procedural, shader

If you’re running a WebGL compliant web browser, you can head on over to Shader Toy and interactively build Pixel Shaders in your browser and see the results.  This is all possible thanks to the new WebGL support and enables an incredible level of experimentation and interactivity, directly in the browser.

Unfortunately I’m not near a WebGL browser at the moment. Someone take a Pic and send it to us, and I’ll be happy to include it!

Graphics, Science browser, interactive, shader, webgl

If you’ve seen “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and marveled at the fantastic shader and colors, then you can thank Danny Damian (amongst many others).  From humble Romanian origins, he’s risen to a star inside Imageworks for his computer programming and graphics knowledge, and discusses it all with CGSociety.

“I was really excited to have the opportunity to use a GI [global illumination] renderer in such a creative way,” he says. “We did a lot of exploration into how to do highly choreographed, artistic work with a ray tracer, to constantly shape it to do what we wanted to do, to manage the rays to shape the light the way we wanted. The art director was particular about hues, ranges and colors inside and outside, so we provided more creative control in shaders and lighting that you might expect.”

via CGSociety – Danny Damian.

Graphics, Science interview, movie, shader, vfx

If you’re interesting in GPGPU or Shader development, you definitely want to check out the supplementary materials for the full-day SIGGRAPH “Beyond Programmable Shading” course.  It contains examples, slides, and papers detailing several topics from leaders in the field.

The first half of the course introduces the trends and directions in this emerging field. Topics include: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and game-developer investigations of the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines.

The second half of the course has leaders from graphics hardware vendors, game development, and academic research present case studies that show how general parallel computation is being combined with the traditional graphics pipeline to boost image quality and spur new graphics algorithm innovation.

via Beyond Programmable Shading 2009.

Graphics, Science gpgpu, shader, siggraph