About Controlling the Hardware Display in Softimage

Softimage comes with several realtime shading views. It is possible to switch from a view representing the mental ray shader properties to that of one representing OpenGl or Nvidia’s Cg shading language, for example. You can develop your own customized hardware rendering display by using the same mechanism Softimage uses natively and provide an accurate representation within Softimage of the rendering pipeline you use within your own production environment. The graphic sequencer enables custom rendering passes in the OpenGL viewport via the C++ API which provides display and pass callbacks to control the rendering pipeline displayed in Softimage.

A Bit About How Softimage’s Cg Support Works

Softimage’s Cg renderer support was implemented as a series of graphic sequencer display callbacks and one display pass. Whenever the Cg render needs to refresh a viewport set to display Cg shaders, it queries the render tree for each realtime shader attached to the objects in the viewport, looks up the MetaShader section of the shader’s SPDL file and reads the Cg code from that section and automatically builds a Cg program. Queries to the MetaShader section of the SPDL file are enabled by methods exposed in the Shader object. This chapter describes the graphic sequencer’s callbacks and passes. For more information about MetaShader and Realtime shader implementation, see MetaShaders and Realtime Shaders.

Graphic Sequencer (XGS) or Custom View Host?

You may also want to consider using the Custom Display Host to display custom render output. For more information about the Custom Display Host, see Custom Display Host.

Where to Find XGS Examples

The following examples of custom hardware displays are available:

• SampleDisplayCallback: Simple project showing a basic implementation.

• DX9Display: The source code for Softimage’s native DirectX 9.0 realtime shader viewing support.

These examples are part of the examples installed with Softimage .

Autodesk Softimage v7.5