Exporting used UV Channel from a Script Material

Kjetil · June 7, 2009, 2:59am

Hello!
I’m messing around a little with xna and such. Up till now I’ve used a .fx file directly, using the directX material.
It worked fine for simpler materials, and I could assign and preview the shader while modelling. Quite handy. There I could select what uv channel the texture should use. So, quite practical, although the gui was limited.

So, I looked into scripted materials which extend the DirectX material. I had a look at the tutorial in the wiki here, and it works fine.
However, I haven’t figured out how to transfer the used UV Channel into the shader material.
Usually I setup a texture for the .fx file like this:
texture DiffuseMap : DiffuseMap
<
string UIName = “Diffuse:”;
int Texcoord = 0;
int MapChannel = 1;
>;
So, if I load the .fx file directly, I get a spinner where I can choose the UV’s. But, how do I do this for the scripted material?

Kjetil

mikiex · June 7, 2009, 2:24pm

[QUOTE=Kjetil;3738]Hello!
I’m messing around a little with xna and such. Up till now I’ve used a .fx file directly, using the directX material.
It worked fine for simpler materials, and I could assign and preview the shader while modelling. Quite handy. There I could select what uv channel the texture should use. So, quite practical, although the gui was limited.

So, I looked into scripted materials which extend the DirectX material. I had a look at the tutorial in the wiki here, and it works fine.
However, I haven’t figured out how to transfer the used UV Channel into the shader material.
Usually I setup a texture for the .fx file like this:
texture DiffuseMap : DiffuseMap
<
string UIName = “Diffuse:”;
int Texcoord = 0;
int MapChannel = 1;
>;
So, if I load the .fx file directly, I get a spinner where I can choose the UV’s. But, how do I do this for the scripted material?

Kjetil[/QUOTE]

We used scripted materials at one point, but then I made an effort to get rid of them and since then we had far less problems.

I can’t remember all the problems as its long ago, for one you could not drag and drop etc on the slots to load bitmaps. Also there may of been problems when updating the shaders that have new features - adding new constants?

I think they would of worked if our shaders didnt change, but they did frequently.

You also had to maintain the scripted materials, the script IDs and fx files alll together.

Sorry I cant offer only vague reasons, but I do remember it being a big weight lifted when we switched to not using scripted materials!

They were’nt worth it for the material looking more artist friendly.

I just remembered…

with the standard dx9 materials if you keep use the same sampler names and constants you can switch shaders which contain the same naming, just by loading the new shader from the top of the material. I think this is impossible with scripted materials, you would have to write a special scripts to convert between different shaders if you used scripted materials. Or you will loose your textures from the slots. This makes it easy for the artists to switch between shaders.

I think if shaders are missing it will default to the default.fx, so its worth putting a check in when you load a file in max it does a check for any materials in the scene that use default.fx and pop up a warning so the user doesnt save this file with lost shader info.

torgo3000 · June 9, 2009, 3:35pm

I used scripted DX materials in the last studio I worked for and it required a ton of overhead to keep stable. The benefit was that the artists authored their content using the exact shaders that were in the game engine. Getting the correct UV’s to pass through from Max to the shader was a pain. We ended up doing it via a preprocessor constant since we used a Super Shader. I would never do this again. Spend your time on fast iteration from DCC to game engine instead. It will reward you 1000% more than focusing your effort on this. The only reason I ended up doing it this way is because we had a completely backward, non-tools focused studio that refused to help out the artists in any way, shape or form for years (it finally got better a couple of years before the whole team got axed). If you are dead set on doing it this way, here’s a sample of how I ended up doing it:

In the scripted material extension parameters:

parameters main rollout:params
(
…
iDetailUVChannel type:#integer default:1
iBumpUVChannel type:#integer default:1
iSpecMapUVChannel type:#integer default:1

…
)

And the script that generated the temporary .fx file that set the preprocessor constants and then included the main .fx file:
…
if thisMat.bHasDetailMap then
(
format "%
" “#define SHD_DETAIL” to:thisFXFile
if thisMat.iDetailUVChannel != 1 then format "%
" “#define SHD_DETAIL_MULTI_UV” to:thisFXFile
)
…
format "

%" “//Include the main .fx file from the engine
#include <…\General.fx>” to:thisFXFile
…

In the material declarations of the .fx file:

#if defined(3DSMAX)
texture BaseTexture < string UIName = “Diffuse Texture”; int Texcoord = 0; int MapChannel = 1; >;
texture DetailTexture < string UIName = “Detail Texture”; int Texcoord = 1; int MapChannel = 2; >;
texture BumpTexture < string UIName = “Normal Texture”; int Texcoord = 1; int MapChannel = 2; >;
texture SpecularTexture < string UIName = “Specular Texture”; int Texcoord = 1; int MapChannel = 2; >;
#else…

In the vertex shader struct:
struct VS_INPUT
{
…
#if defined(PS_NEEDS_MULTI_UV)
float2 vTex2 : TEXCOORD1;
#endif
…
};

So the 2nd UV set would be passed out of the vertex shader via Texcoord1. Then the logic takes over in the main body of the shader:

#ifdef SHD_DETAIL_MULTI_UV
o.ToPix.TexDetail.xy = vTex2 * DetailScale;
#else
o.ToPix.TexDetail.xy = vTex * DetailScale;
#endif

We used a super shader and we ended up creating a single scripted DirectX material extension that had every possible element in it. If you do decide to use a scripted DX Material extension, here are the things you will have to manage every time you open a file:

Find the path to a valid .fx file or default.fx will be used instead. (And of course Max stores hard-coded paths here.)
Find the path to all of your run-time .dds texture files or the shader will look incorrect. (And of course Max stores hard-coded paths here as well.)
A function that makes a correlation between the scripted Material data and the UI slots created from the .fx file in the DirectXMaterial

The nice thing about the scripted DirectX Material extension is that it actually saves your data. If you just use the DirectX Material directly, you will lose all of your data the first time you open that file and it can’t find the path to the .fx file. So an artist opening a file on a different machine will ruin the file’s shaders.

My recommendation: Don’t do this! Store the data in an extensible, schematized format like XML and create a simple authoring tool. Make a material name in 3ds Max / shader data correlation. Then just arbitrarily update the materials with temporary Direct X Materials if you want to visualize them in Max (be sure not to change the name of the material in the Max file ever). You could write a function to update the materials and then run that function whenever something changes or loads. Don’t store custom game data in Max whenever you can avoid it. And doing that would take about the same amount of work as writing and managing the scripted DX Material (well over 3500 lines of script in our case).

Good luck!

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mikiex · June 13, 2009, 2:27pm

Sounds like you had similar issues torgo3000,

We havent had any problems with Standard DX materials and Artist trashing files, there are plenty of warnings if someone loads a file with missing .fx shaders and everything is under source control. Everyone has the same exact paths on their machines to textures and .fx files. Its possible to mess things up, but our team is generally good and not doing that (he says with all fingers crossed)

Kjetil · June 14, 2009, 9:08am

Hey guys. thanks for the feedback and information.
It’s interesting to hear others experiences and opinions.

I did get this working finally, by supplying integer values from 3dsmax choosing the right uv channel. Then I used this value to pick the right uv channel from an array containing the number of uv channels available. I got this tip from one of the tools guys at work. Much more elegant solution than what I came up with.

I do work with games, but as a technical artists. So my main occupation is not programming, but it’s interesting to be able to do some programming, and understand a bit what’s going on under the hood.

So, this tool is more for one of my own smaller xna projects. I still like to have things tidy and woorking smoothly

Anyway, using a scriptable material extention of a directx material seems to work fine, and mainly (for me) there’s the benefit of not having to do anything special with the material setup inside the xna application. Everything just works, textures follow through and are assigned automagically, and the same with all material properties.
So, it’s very practical from a get-things-working-without-doing-much-code point of view

We do have a script based material system at work as well, and yes there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are of course to be able to tweak the material in the 3dsmax viewport. The disadvantage is of course that you have to be very careful to make sure the in-game shader is synced with the 3dsmax shader. We’ve had some cases where these two behaved differently in some respects and it’s not a good thing. Having a single “super-material” is in a way more limiting than the node based approach, but perhaps easier to control. Maybe something inbetween the two would be a better approach.

And the biggest problem is that the .dx materials perform really badly if you compare with standard materials. It’s quite tragic really, and to my knowledge there’s no change since the .dx material was first introduced. A good idea, but it doesn’t fully work in practice, since the performance is so low.
So, you need fallback-to-standardmaterial to fix this somehow.

I guess the optimal would be to be able to edit materials fully in-game, as there’s becoming more and more material/game specific features which are hard, or impossible to do from within 3dsmax.

Kjetil.

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