I was wondering if anyone knows of any tools to help design procedural textures.  More specially I need something that will output the actual procedure rather than just the texture.  It could output HLSL or some pseudo code that I can port to HLSL. The important thing is I need the algorithm, not just the texture so I can put it into a pixel shader myself.  I posted the question on the Allegorithmic forum, but someone answered that while Substance Designer uses procedures internally, it doesn't support output of code, so I guess that one is out.

You should check out Shadertoy, it displays the shader code for all the effects:

https://www.shadertoy.com/

You can also try: http://shdr.bkcore.com/, it's a smaller project but has a clean and slick design. You also have a mesh to work with.

Oh and there's also: http://glslsandbox.com/

(GLSL though)

Thanks guys. I'll check them out. Seems like they use the same methodology. They simply just let you see what you've written instantaneously. I guess I could even write my own program that does something like that reasonably fast.

@Hashbrown very nice, I didn't know about these two. I tried the #version directive under Firefox but they both support only #version 100, not even #version 110. Is that normal? 

@pcmaster I just checked the source code for glslsandbox and apparently they're using a WebGL 1 context , which doesn't support anything greater than glsl 100 as far as I know. 

var contextNames = ["moz-webgl", "webkit-3d", "experimental-webgl", "webgl", "3d"]; // From glslsandbox

I guess they're trying to target as many browsers possible. I would have completely ignored WebGL1 and sticked to WebGL2 in order to support version 300 es.

As for Shadr, they're apparently using THREE.js and I'm not sure what webgl context that library defaults to

Now that I kind of know what to look for, I did a bit more googling around and I found this one too.

https://www.arteryengine.com/shadron/

This is actually pretty awesome and not expensive. Thanks for the share.