I've had the luxury of developing and using my own proprietary ( node-based and code-based ) shader tools over the last 15 years in the production of games like Call of Duty Black Ops 1 and 2, but I've always felt there's been a lack of good stand-alone shader authoring solutions available in the public domain for students, graphics enthousiasts and even hardcore shader developers like myself who want to quickly experiment with new rendering effects without having to hard code a bunch of rendering logic into a complex multi-platform engine or convoluted 3rd party rendering pipeline or hack together your own bare bones visual studios project.
After leaving my job at Activision, I decided I would take some time and throw together a next-generation shader authoring solution, not just for my future gaming projects, but hopefully others who want to learn, experiment or take their productivity and creativity to the next level. Here is ShaderFlex and NodeFlex which I hope to release later this year.
ShaderFlex is a new breed of stand-alone code-based HLSL shader editors developed to take full advantage of DirectX 11/12 and is similar to NVidia's FX Composer. ShaderFlex is flexible enough to render almost any rendering effect you want to throw at it ( smooth particle hydrodynamics, fur simulations, fast fourier transform water simulations, fluid dynamics, atmospheric scattering, physically based rendering, you name it ). ShaderFlex also has supports for the Oculus DK1/DK2 ( Direct HMD Access ) and 3DConnexion's line of space mouses.
NodeFlex is a very powerful, node-based data generator designed to greatly simplify any tedious, redundant and error-prone data authoring tasks. Node-based authoring has been a core feature to almost every major graphics package on the market for years, and now with NodeFlex, you can add that same capability to your own tools and pipeline.
Screenshots
The site is still a work in progress but I'd love to hear your feedback and features you would like to see in the final version.
Scott
