DeleD Community Edition

[AWM Mars]

When I look at the textures in the materials window, everything looks so squashed (everything is square and low resolution) I cannot make out what the texture looks like. Some modellers use naming protocols like Texture0, which confuses the hell out of programmes.
Even renaming each texture only works if you use very short names due to lack of visible space in the display window.
What I would suggest is, a right hand click menu, giving the option to preview the texture at full resolution in a breakout window.
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[chronozphere]

Agreed. I think the whole material manager should be redone from scratch. Right now, the window is quite big, while the portion showing the actual textures is too small.

We need more developers. I have a very limited time budget to invest in DeleD, so an extra pair of hands would be most welcome.

[AWM Mars]

You all do an awesome job for sure.

I find Materials to be a key feature, afterall it is primarily what you see as a end result.

I have spend hours getting quality textures together, into named folders, adding bump and defuse maps. I have several Shaders as well, but can see no way to add them in DeleD (DeleD is a superb modelling platform, good material handling would be the icing on the cake).

The texture navigation window/function is a bit limiting, you have to create the folder and add your textures before you start the project, in the DeleD Texture folder. I do have a healthy set of 'default' folders like Brick, Concrete, Cloth etc etc, but add new textures all the time, so they get full quickly.

If anyone gets the time (who knows) a deeper explaination about how to setup materials using the layers and functions, that will help negate a lot of guessing (I said I was a novice).

At the end of it all, it is the developers that give up their time freely, that hone a great programme into a greater programme, and I thank you for doing it.
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[chronozphere]

[AWM Mars]

I suspect the 'shaders' functionality require the rendering engine to support the output.
I'm no programmer, and when I use most programmes that can use shaders, the manual goes off into lots of 'all you need to do is, write 20 gazillion lines of standard code, to enjoy your shader' at this point, my wife normally wakes me...
I do have nVidia's excellent shader composer programme http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html and save the files into relative folders.... but thats as far as I got.
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[trucker2000]

To add shader support to deled would take a major rewrite of the rendering engine, and, would only support the shader type that deled's renderer uses. (openGl or directX)
I don't know how other engines apply shaders, but Torque just uses a material def. to assign it in the engine. (simple script)
It would be nice to see shaders rendered in deled, but I think the end result would be more work than it's worth, not to mention, updating the exporters which I don't think will keep the info anyway.
The easiest possibility would be to add a tag that another engine can be programed to read that tells it about the shader.

(or with my limited knowelege of shaders, I could be totally and completely off the mark.)
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[chronozphere]

It would require a big rewrite of the material system.. that's for sure.

I do think that this would be a great improvement. It will only work for GLSL shaders because DeleD uses OpenGL, but that's not a problem because many engines and developers use OpenGL.
About the exporters, my plan was to keep them the same. Their purpose is to export "models" and not fancy materials. Most mesh formats do not contain any specific material information anyway.

A shader renderer can also be developed in the form of a plugin. The shader filepaths are saved in the material tags and the plugin can be used to edit/view the shaders.

[Starnick]

If you wanted to try an attempt at cross-platforming for shaders between openGL and directX you could always try and go with Cg and use the Cg runtime to bind the shaders.

Really you just need a mechanism to load the program, compile it, bind it, and set parameters. Depending how well things are organized under the hood, that may be an immensely difficult task, or it may be a lot easier than thought. Afterall, you'd expect all that to be automatic and easily done with a few simple clicks.

From my own experience (and some experience working with maya), exporting shader information used in deled would not be at all necessary. Just need the basic material color info/textures. Some engines use material scripts to define everything, others don't, some use semantics to bind parameters, others don't, etc etc.

At least that goes for general exporting. Even without shader support, custom model exporting still requires a lot of work in creating a pipeline anyways, so I wouldn't exactly fret over it.

[AWM Mars]

I mean the actual creation of shaders etc, which output formats for both OpenGL and DirectX, can be done by 3rd party software (why reinvent the wheel?) It's just the inclusion of shaders when modelling/rendering that could be deemed as an important function.
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