Abstract
In order to simplify shader programming we propose a system to specify composable shaders in a functional way directly in typical implementation languages of modern rendering frameworks. In constrast to existing pipeline shader frameworks, our system exposes a radically simplified pipeline, which we purposefully aligned with our basic intuition of shaders as compositions of per-primitive and per-pixel operations. By programming the shaders in the host language, we additionally remove the complexity of handling different programming languages for shaders and the rest of the framework.
The resulting simplicity lends itself to structure modules purely based on their semantic, instead of dealing with structure enforced by specific versions of graphics APIs. Thus our system offers great flexibility when it comes to reusing and combining shaders with completely different semantics, or when targeting different graphics APIs: our high level shaders can be automatically translated into the shading language of the backend (e.g. HLSL, GLSL, CG).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Manuel Wieser for providing 3D models, especially Eigi, The Dinosaur. The competence center VRVis is funded by BMVIT, BMWFJ, and City of Vienna (ZIT) within the scope of COMET Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies. The program COMET is managed by FFG.
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Haaser, G., Steinlechner, H., May, M., Schwärzler, M., Maierhofer, S., Tobler, R. (2015). Semantic Composition of Language-Integrated Shaders. In: Battiato, S., Coquillart, S., Pettré, J., Laramee, R., Kerren, A., Braz, J. (eds) Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics - Theory and Applications. VISIGRAPP 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 550. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25117-2_4
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