RenderMonkey™ Toolsuite

[Tami]

RenderMonkey v1.5 shader editor adds support for the OpenGL Shading Language

RenderMonkey is a full featured shader editor for rapid prototyping of shaders. This major v1.5 update includes full support for OpenGL 1.5 and the OpenGL Shading Language. It also includes a number of improvements to the shader creation workflow and a number of new features. The integrated shader compiler and preview window provide immediate visual feedback. The SDK supports the creation of custom importers and exporters.

RenderMonkey™ Toolsuite
RenderMonkey is a rich shader development environment for both programmers and artists which facilitates the collaborative creation of real-time shader effects.

For Programmers

RenderMonkey contains a full featured shader editor, allowing for rapid prototyping of shaders. The integrated shader compiler and preview window provide immediate visual feedback for the effect under development – ensuring that errors in programming are identified early in the development process.
Incorporates a number of features to aid in shader debugging and optimization.
The RenderMonkey SDK supports the creation of custom importers and exporters, allowing tight integration of RenderMonkey into your current workflow
Support for Microsoft’s DirectX .FX format ensures interoperability with all major DCC packages.

For Artists

The artist specific workspace view and artist editor allows much of the programming complexity of shaders to be hidden from artists
Shader parameters can be adjusted using familiar widgets.
The integrated preview window provides immediate visual feedback on any changes.
RenderMonkey is tightly coupled with artists existing texture and modelling tools.


RenderMonkey includes full support for the latest DirectX® (9.0c) and OpenGL® (1.5) shading languages. RenderMonkey also includes a large number of sample effects which are freely available to be used and customized for your applications.

Key Features: Shader Development
Debugging Shaders and Performance Tuning
Managing Effect Data
Artist Interface
Custom Component Creation


Application Design and Philosophy
Real-time high performance shaders are at the heart of all new visual effects and they will continue to be the foundation of an amazing graphical experience for the future. The RenderMonkey IDE has been created to fill the need for shader content creation tools in a coherent environment—flexible and powerful for programmers, yet familiar and intuitive for artists. With the introduction of the DirectX and OpenGL high level shading languages, the complexity of real-time shaders has increased. The rapid evolution of the shading capabilities of graphics hardware had caused an explosion in the the amount of shader content necessary for real-time graphics projects, fueling the need for a powerful real-time shader IDE. The RenderMonkey environment not only allows easy shader prototyping and development, but also provides a mechanism for managing the shaders and all of the associated visual resources in a single environment.

Standard Graphics APIs
The RenderMonkey IDE enables shader production on any hardware supporting standard graphics APIs—the latest release of the RenderMonkey IDE provides integrated support for both DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 1.5 include the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL).

Programmers and Artists
RenderMonkey has been designed to meet the needs of programmers and artists, allowing both to collaborate on shader effects. Separate interfaces exist in RenderMonkey for programming by technical shader developers as well as for purely visual modification by non-technical artists. RenderMonkey allows anyone interested in creating shaders to dive straight into the shader creation process.

The program allows the structure of an effect, including the body of the shader and all assets, to be visualized in a tree structure. Users can view the gradual build-up of an effect by examining individual rendering passes in the application’s rendering windows or by dynamically examining the contents of all renderable textures. RenderMonkey enables quick debugging of shaders via interactive output of intermediate results computed by the shader. This can be particularly useful in teaching environments where visualizing an intermediate result is fundamental to understanding. RenderMonkey has been chosen by several universities to teach shader technology in their graphics curriculum.

The application includes a variety of convenient features which give programmers fine control over their development environment. Optimization hints are included to aid in the analysis of shader performance,while both artists and programmers have access to familiar and intuitive GUI widgets for interactively editing parameters to shaders. The visual results of these modifications are instantly viewable on the integrated rendering preview window.


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