Animated shaders and workflow

[YouGroove]

LE3 in V3.1 uses now "animated shaders"

That means animated models won't animate if you don't use some "animated shader"

 

Never seen that elsewhere, specific shaders for animated characters or models.

 

This is related to shadows on animated models or because of skinning done on shaders ?

Ot it is some big programming shortcut ?

 

Usually like done previously, any shader worked with models could they be animated or not.

This just downgrade the possibilities, as any new material like Glow, or new one you write could not work on animated models or would need to be converted.

 

Animation or shadows even if done on GPU should be separated from rendering at maximum.

 

If one evolve like animation or shadosw, the impact will be too great : change all shaders.

I just hope LE3 to come back on the track and allow any shader on animated characters.

[Guppy]

you seem to be continuing a conversation here - only the only post made so far is yours?

[YouGroove]

Nope it's a question

Why animated shaders ? I modified the content should be more clear.

[Guppy]

Ah your talking about the skinning shader

 

Rich source of confusion that skinning and animation means differenting to shaders than to modelers ^^

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

 

"In most state-of-the-art graphical engines, the skinning process is done on the GPU thanks to a shader program"

 

Basically its done on a shader because due to parallelization it's much, much faster than doing it on cpu - or as Josh likes to claim it's free, that is not entirely true but it's close enough

 

 

 

Edited to fix wikipedia quote screwing up the post

Edited February 6, 2014 by Guppy

[Guppy]

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[YouGroove]

Perhaps but why not keep it separate ?

1- Skinning shader

2- Graphic shader

Two calls instead of one is not what will really make a difference , as 3.1 don't have any optimization systems for now.

This really break down a lot the possibilities for characters or any animated models and shaders.

 

Shader Workflow and portability broken down caus skinning is "mixed" with graphic display.

 

[klepto2]

Skinning is done in a shader because it is multiple times faster than on cpu.

Nearly any modern engine uses seperate shaders for skinned animation.

On most of them you might not notice it because they preparse shader code and use #define statements or other methods

to branch one shader into multiple ones.

This was the way LE2 did it. While it is easier for the enduser to just have one shader (sometimes called "ubershader" or "godshader") it is not that easy to implement the correct branching and parsing structure. Also you are mainly dependend from one shader and everything needs to be included in it. So just creating a eg. phong shader and share it with the community wouldn't be that easy.

[YouGroove]

Nearly any modern engine uses seperate shaders for skinned animation.

 

 

All engines have Skinned performed by hardware than CPU from lot of years.

That's the point any modern engine use a separate shader for skinned animation , and they use separate shaders for graphic rendering also.

 

 

On most of them you might not notice it because they preparse shader code and use #define statements or other methods

to branch one shader into multiple ones.

This was the way LE2 did it. While it is easier for the enduser to just have one shader (sometimes called "ubershader" or "godshader") it is not that easy to implement the correct branching and parsing structure. Also you are mainly dependend from one shader and everything needs to be included in it. So just creating a eg. phong shader and share it with the community wouldn't be that easy

 

Actually the problem is MERGING Skinning and graphic rendering on same shader

That's not the way UDK works for example.

 

 

Unfortunatelly, People using LE3 are mainly coders and actually will use Diff/Norm/Spec shader for characters, so it won't be needs for other character shaders like light scattering , glow or other stuff ....

 

So let it be like that.

[klepto2]

UDK makes the same as LE, but under the hood. UDK has a really advanced material-system which generates the shader on demand. Their material system is more or less a bunch of multiple scripts which are later compiled to the target shader language. (like the flowgraph in LE) Under the hood UDK as well has several (if not much much more ) predefined shader templates which are used depending if the model is animated, opaque or something completely different.

 

Could Leadwerks do the same? Yes, theoretically. To be honest i believe such a system needs a lot of manpower and time to make it stable and usable. (the things needs to be optimized, optional compilation pathes based on gpu, etc. ) So currently Leadwerks is going the easy and stable way, instead of delivering something unfinished which might be more complicated than the system right now.

 

PS: Leadwerks is not UDK and will never be.

[YouGroove]

PS: Leadwerks is not UDK and will never be.

Indeed, and i would be working with UDK if i needed it's shader system and all it's tools.