organizing shaders and effects question

PowerVR Insider
1

I’ll try to keep this simple: Let’s say I have 25 textures. Of these 25 textures 1 requires an environment map effect, 1 requires an alpha test, and 3 require bump map effects. The remaining 20 textures only need a default vertex and fragment shader. So, how do I structure my effect file with respect to the 20 default shader textures?



Here is what I think effect.pfx file should have:



1 environment effect

1 alpha effect

3 bump effects (sharing the same vert/frag shader)



vertEnvironmentShader

fragEnvironmentShader



vertAlphaShader

fragAlphaShader



vertBumpShader

fragBumpShader



Am I correct on this so far?



I’m not quite sure what to do about my default texture vert/fragment shaders at this point. I’m assuming that to define them in the pfx file, I would have to create an effect name for every texture that will be using them. For instance:



defaultFloor (uses floor.pvr)

defaultWall (uses wall.pvr)

defaultShelf (…)

defaultBox (…)

…



What I’d rather do is load default vert and frag shaders from .vsh and .fsh files



Is this doable? Basically I’d be adding the shaders needed for this app from pfx and .vsh/.fsh file types. If it’s not possible to do this, would it possible to define a defaultEffect which allows me to use any texture I need for the particular mesh being drawn?



Thanks for the help.



Valerie

2

In PFX, an EFFECT block is a material that can be applied to one or more objects in your scene. Because of this, it is best to create an EFFECT block for every material definition (i.e. texture and shader block combination).



It may be possible to hack around and create a ‘default’ effect but you would have to manually bind textures instead of letting PFX do it. A better approach could be automating the EFFECT block creation for materials where only the bound texture changes.



Thanks,

Joe

3

Joe, thanks for your support. I like the idea of automating this process, and had not thought of that. Two questions if you don’t mind…


  1. Do you mean programatically create the Effect block during application load time, or via some sort of script?


  2. The is very interesting, can you tell me what creating the EFFECT block for each material/texture combination gains me? That is, is it for gpu/cpu/app efficiency?



    Sorry for the newbie questions.



    Valerie
4

1. Do you mean programatically create the Effect block during application load time, or via some sort of script?



If you can, I’d suggest doing this offline. There shouldn’t be any reason to change the EFFECT blocks at run-time. It’s down to personal preference whether this should be done programatically or via a script.





2. The is very interesting, can you tell me what creating the EFFECT block for each material/texture combination gains me? That is, is it for gpu/cpu/app efficiency?



The benefit is simply that PFX was designed with material definitions in mind. If you attempt to repeatedly use a single EFFECT block with different textures, you will have to manually bind the textures instead of letting the PFX handling the code do this for you.



No problem :slight_smile:



Joe