2 pixel shaders

**Magos** · 06-11-2005

I started playing around a bit with pixel shaders (man are they fun

). Now assume I want 2 shaders to execute after each other, 1 for the induvidual face then 1 for the entire screen (after everything is rendered), is there an easy way to do this or do I have to render to some offscreen surface then render that surface to the screen using the other shader?

**MrWizard** · 06-11-2005

I'm not sure but I believe you'll have to render everything to an offscreen texture and then render that texture using the post-processing pixel shader like you said. I don't believe you can use the first method you said and I can't really think of another method off the top of my head.

**VirtualAce** · 06-12-2005

In order to do this you must render your scene to an offscreen texture which acts as the screen image. All of the shaders relevant to creating the scene will then be executed normally just as if you were rendering to the actual screen.

After rendering is complete then you must pass in the offscreen texture as the source texture or input texture to the post-processing pixel shader.

1. The shaders relevant to the scene have nothing to do with the post-processing shader.
2. The shaders for the scene execute just as they would if you were rendering to the screen.
3. The post-processing shader operates on the final offscreen texture and then outputs to that texture as well.
4. Setup a full screen-quad and call SetTexture() and set the texture to the offscreen texture you have altered. Draw the quad. The quad will not have the offscreen texture as it's texture and you are taking full advantage of the hardware acceleration available to you.

This can also be done with a clever use of the SetRenderTarget() method in IDirect3DDevice9.

**Magos** · 06-13-2005

I already managed to do this, by using a D3DXRenderToSurface structure. Notes for anyone trying to do the same:

¤ Do NOT render using a D3DXSprite structure, shaders won't have any effect!
¤ Do NOT render using a mesh, XYZRHW is not supported!

Thanks anyway!

**Magos** · 06-13-2005

On a sidenote, shaders are more limited than I first thought. Unless you have the latest gfx card with shader v666.0 you can't do too much. It took a lot of modifying around before I managed to get a grayscale shader with a factor (0 = no grayscale, 1 = full grayscale) to compile. Got lots of "too advanced" error messages...

What really disappoints me is that it seems you cannot to access another pixel in the texture in shader v1.3 (highest version my card seems to support). I wanted to create a heat effect with the screen blurring around, but that seems very distant right now...

**VirtualAce** · 06-13-2005

How are you compiling your shaders? This is where I got rather confused - I'd like to compile them w/o leaving MSVC's IDE - does MS have a tool for this that plugs into the IDE?

**Magos** · 06-13-2005

I do it at runtime using D3DXCompileShader().

**sand_man** · 06-13-2005

Originally Posted by Magos

I do it at runtime using D3DXCompileShader().

You mean it interprets it at run time? or it compiles it at compile time?

**Magos** · 06-13-2005

At runtime. I have these psh (pixel shader) and vsh (vertex shader) ASCII files with the HLSL language in them. When the exe runs it loads them, calls D3DXCompileShader() and I get some binary data back which I use when creating the shader objects.

It's most likely possible to pre-compile the shader files but I haven't noticed any speed reduction so I guess the compilation is pretty fast anyway, no need to pre-compile.

Also, modability++ if they aren't pre-compiled

.

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