Shade

Shade is intended to be a learning and debugging tool. D3D12 will be used as the initial graphics backend, with a Vulkan one coming at a later date when app has more features and is decoupled from the rendering backend.

While the envisioned final product has menu systems galore, initial development only requires a small set of functionality and interactivity. Initial app will consist of a single window, with all UI elements being drawn inside its bounds via DX12. Window contents will consist of ImGui elements and a number of viewports. A viewport shows the contents of a scene, rendered with the relevant shaders, meshes, and other state. A scene may have multiple viewports, each differing in view, shaders, mesh visibility, etc...

Essentially the starting goal is a material editor ripped out of Blender/UE4.

Dependencies

Shade currently depends on FMT, ImGui, ImNodes and assimp.

Initial Features

Initial goals are a shader editor and mesh viewer with UI elements like Blender and UE4.

Meshes

Load from file
Rotate, scale, translate via UI
View metadata
Edit mesh attributes
Edit vertex/primitive attributes

Shaders

Select shaders to use for a viewport
- UI slots for each shader type in pipeline
Live shader edit
- Text editor with colorization
- Button (F5?) to re-compile shader and pipeline
- Compilation error feedback (both shader and pipeline)
- View shader assembly code in form of DXIL, AMDIL, SP3, ...
- Step through debug (RenderDoc API?)
Construct shaders via node graph
- Base code generation
- Supplemental instrumentation
- View resulting shader
- Save as material
Cache of recent shaders
- Autosave with file hash
- Option to rename and keep open

Next steps:

Fixed viewports
Entities
Parameterize and better expose pipelines
Chain pipelines
UI prettification

Longer Term

Longer term goal is a competent and intuitive UI with easy navigation between multiple tooling modes and/or simultaneous usage.