A few days ago, I was asked, “oh, you’re still doing tools programming? They haven’t promoted you yet?” It made me chuckle. This kind of inquiry is something I am familiar with fielding; even within the industry itself, tools programming is often regarded as less than glamourous. Some — such as the fellow who asked …
Recently, I started working on a visual shader construction tool; something along the lines of the Unreal material editor, the now-unavailable ShaderWorks, and the visual render path tools present in modeling packages like Maya and Blender. I also borrowed heavily from some concepts presented in Morgan McGuire’s “Abstract Shade Trees” paper. Such tools are uncommon. …