ShaderFX is free

For individuals and companies with less than 2 people.

It's a great node based shader editor for 3dsmax which supports HLSL and CG. We use it with the Ofusion exporter to export shaders to ogre. Very good indeed if your an artist who isn't into coding, or anyone that wants to get a general shader library made quickly.



http://www.lumonix.biz/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1232635893

that looks cool....but I use XSI which has it inbuilt :p

Yeah but is it any good for games. ShaderFX was made by a couple of developers from Bioware who worked on Mass Effect etc.

Mental Mill by nvidia is free too but the output from that is a mess in comparrison. Plus if you use 3dsmax and shaderfx with Ogre and the ofusion exporter you can see the shaders rendered in realtime in an ogre viewport in 3dsmax, export Ogre optimized shaders and use 3dsmax as your level editor in Flow offering a lot of extra features not normally available elsewhere. Which is the main reason why I like it :)



3dsmax also has very good D3D shader support in viewports. OpenGL is fading fast these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fVsJDNrs34&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IU-iZ7m2f8&fmt=18