Parallax Demo
In my last post I had some screenies of a parallax shader that I made in RenderMonkey, however I hadn’t finished the demo yet. Now I have! This demo shows my parallax shader on a sphere and lets you control the bumpiness and the amount of parallax. It really requires ps2.0 hardware, but will run on ps1.4 without the parallax effect and with crappy bumpmapping.
Converting from RenderMonkey to .fx was much harder than I thought. The biggest differences are:
1) Naming/Semantic conventions of variables. It would be nice if RenderMonkey exported the same Semantic values that Effect Edit recognizes, maybe next version.
2) Matrices are transposed with respect to how D3DX stores them. This is no biggy, but something to be aware of. Just reverse the parameter order of your mul function.
3) RenderMonkey does a much better job of fixing .x files to have tangents. The D3DX library can do this, but it doesnt work on some models.
The third difference above had me stuck for several days. I was trying to use Cube.x which worked great in RenderMonkey but doesn’t get correct tangents using D3DX. I kept thinking my shader was messed up, but it turned out to be the model all along. When I switched to sphere.x it worked like a charm.
After a lot of learning, several re-writes, and some help from Sebby, ParallaxDemo is finally finished. Get it here.
September 4th, 2004 at 6:30 pm
Awesome!
Great to see you finally got it working!
September 5th, 2004 at 12:43 pm
After some reading, it turns out point #1 above may not be true. Effect Edit doesnt use the correct naming conventions from what I can see, so rendermonkey may be doing so.