Shaderlink

Shaderlink is a RenderMan shader authoring tool. It lets you build shaders by placing shading nodes and connecting them through links. It was inspired by similar tools like Sler, ShaderMan and mental mill.

Shaderlink is also the first of my "pet" projects that didn't turn into vaporware and I am really proud of it! ;-)

Shaderlink was developed in Python. The gui was built using the wonderful toolkit QT from Trolltech. Some image conversion stuff was done using PIL (Python Imaging Library). Currently 3Delight and PRMan are the the only RenderMan compliant renderers supported.

NEWS: Shaderlink 0.5 is now released with a nice BSD license.

Features

  • Graphical shading editor with "scalable" UI
  • Node code editor
  • Node properties editor
  • Shading language code generation
  • Undo - Redo on most operations
  • Copy - Paste on nodes
  • XML node format
  • Rendering preview
  • Support for surface and displacement shaders
  • Support for imager and volume shaders (flaky by now, will be better...)

Sample shaders provided:

  • Frog
  • Mars Rock
  • Ray Tracing
  • NPR Rendering
  • X Ray
  • Toon
  • Paint

Commands

Shortcut Action
Scroll wheel Zoom tool
Shift + LMB Pan tool

Install

On Windows, to run Shaderlink you need Python, PyQT, PIL (Python Imaging Library) and a RenderMan compliant renderer supported.

On Linux (Fedora 11 OK!) and OSX the same libraries.

Pics

Graphical editor:

Rendering settings:

X-Ray Shader:

Mars Rock:

NPR Shader:

Ray Tracing:

Rendering preview:

Node properties:

Node preview:

Code generation:

Node code editor:

Logo (by Alberto Cerutti):



Who:

Code dump:

Wish lists:

  • My Amazon.com Wish List