So I've opted to create a materials system for my project engine that unifies a procedural texture generation engine and GPU shader programs in a Quake3-texture- shader style material scripting language.

Now, the reason for this is because I think it's important to try to simplify the process and the system for artists so that they aren't dealing with textures and texture generation procedures as one set of data, then a set of GPU shaders as another, and combining them in yet another set of material scripts where everything comes together. It just seems unnecessarily tedious and confusing for artists and designers to have to deal with when they're job is to be creative.

I have only recently started getting into taking advantage of all the neat stuff GPU's have to offer in the way of functionality, and I am trying to design a tool for composing materials that allows an artist to design a material without ever needing to see a line of script code, or shader code. I would like to modularize the fragment/vertex shader programs in a way that the artist could simply check off the effects that they want their material to exhibit, and the composer tool automatically generates the corresponding vert/frag shaders to send to the GPU at runtime for the material. I hear talk of an Ubershader concept? But I'm not entirely sure thats the way I want to go, as I feel it would be more sensible to build up a shader out of pieces or 'modules' that fit together, as opposed to starting with a fully-fledged shader with all the bells and whistles and removing portions that won't be needed from it.

Does anyone know of any examples or projects that I could look at to get some ideas? I've decided on a few things after checking out some procedural texture editing programs like werkkzeug and neotexturedit, but I'm especially adamant about making all the GPU shader stuff totally invisible to the artists/designers.