Getting started with FX Composer 2.5

  One of the things I enjoy a lot as a programmer is being able to handle things on the Graphics end. This can come from many things such as creating a user interface for games or handling 2D and 3D graphics and implementing them through a game engine or Direct X. Staring this new course excites me because we begin to approach more of the three dimensional aspects of Direct X such as messing with Shaders. One of the things we were first introduced to was something called FX Composer and I'd have to say the professor wasn't lying, it seriously looks like a combination of 3ds Max and a programming language combine together! FX Composer is basically a tool where developers on the graphics end can create or modify shaders through the use of creating an Effect file. The Effect file is then associated with a Direct3D program where a programmer can utilize that shader on a 3D model. With the use of DirectX Standard Annotations and Semantics (DXSAS) programmers are allowed to edit values of Annotations on a "host application" where they can actually modify the shader for their own use. So in other words we can utilize a shader on two different objects and have two different looks to it through tweaking the parameters of annotations.

FX Composer

  As you can see with the picture above, this is FX Composer and it really does look like a combination of 3DS max and C++! The middle window is the Editor or where all the programming lies where as the top left window is the material window. The top right window is the propeties window which gives you the properties of a material and the bottom right is the perspective window where you can see a mesh with the shader/material applied to it. So to start this all off, looking at the Phong effect file we can see quite a few things such as Lamp0Pos, Ambient, Bump, Ect. Under these you see annotations such as UIName, UIMin, UIMax and so on. These annotations have values which can be messed with through FX Composer or even through C++ which is great because that means you can dynamically change these values!

Effect Skeleton

  So the question you may ask yourself is how do you grab these annotations in C++? Well one way you can do this is through determining the annotations data type and then create a variable with that same data type and another variable which is a handler. So for instance, in this project we worked with the Gooch Bump Shader type. The shader has things where you can change it's warm color and cool color and it's data type dealt with color. So what I did was create four variables of type D3DXCOLOR and D3DXHANDLE and named it warmColor, coolColor, hWarmColor, hCoolColor. In the function where we load the effect file of the shader I grab the two handlers and had them call getParameterByName which took in the names of the semantics. Doing so basically said... okay we're going to assign these handlers to the semantics allowing you to edit their values as you please.

Renderer

  Thus leading me to the Renderer Function where I messed with the parameters setting warmColor to D3DXCOLOR(0.7f, 0.03f, 0.01f, 1.0f) and coolColor to D3DXCOLOR(0.01f, 0.05f, 0.25f, 1.0f). After setting the colors you have to set in the values which then you take into account the handler and the variable which you stored the color. With this I did
        m_pEffect->SetValue(hWarmColor, &warmColor, sizeof(D3DXCOLOR));
m_pEffect->SetValue(hCoolColor, &coolColor, sizeof(D3DXCOLOR));

  Which gave me the picture below:

Result

  For a first assignment I'd have to say this was quite fun and I look foward to what else FX Composer brings to the table!