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Last Updated:
06
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12
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2008
FX Composer 2.5 Beta 2
 What's New
FX Composer is a powerful integrated development
environment for shader authoring. This new beta includes:
- DirectX 10 support (including geometry shaders and
stream out)
- Support for the NVIDIA
Shader Debugger
- Particle systems
- Visual models and styles (ability to create, define, and
export multiple looks for a model)
- Improved user interface
- Remote control over TCP/IP
In addition, Beta 2 contains
the following improvements:
- Major User Interface Improvements
- Reorganized menu structure
- Larger, more vibrant icons
- Unified Importing of Models
- Improved Performance
- Numerous bug fixes
- Updated documentation
Quick Links
The release also bundles mental
mill™ Artist Edition, which allows you to author shaders
visually by connecting nodes. You can export shaders from mental mill™
Artist Edition to FX Composer, where you can apply them to real-world
geometry and perform more complex operations.
Please visit our developer forums,
where you can report bugs and share suggestions. We greatly
appreciate and value your feedback. We also encourage you to
use the Instant Feedback feature (just press F4) of our Software
Improvement Program to share comments and suggestions
directly from inside FX Composer.
FX Composer has an extensive set of capabilities. To get
started, take a look at the Quick
Tutorial. These include Shader Library integration,
ShaderPerf analysis, animation support, COLLADA support, scripting,
effect and project wizards, customizable toolbars and layouts, and much
more.
Key Features of FX Composer 2.5
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Shader Creation Wizard
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Visual Models and Styles
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Particle Systems
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Integrated Shader Library
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Texture Viewer
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Shader Performance
Analysis
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mental
mill Artist Edition
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- Cross-API Support
- New!
DirectX 10
- DirectX 9, and OpenGL
- HLSL, COLLADA FX Cg, CgFX shading languages
- New! Support for Shader
Debugger plug-in
- New!
Particle Systems
- New!
Visual Models and Styles
- Ability to create, define, and export multiple
looks for a model
- New!
Remote Control Service over TCP/IP
- New!
Shader Perf with GeForce 8 Series Support
- New!
Improved User Interface
- Unified project model
- Reduced user interface clutter
- Single-device operation
- Enlarged icons with captions
- Shader Creation Wizard with templates
- Full-featured Code Editor
- New! Automatic,
Customizable Code Snippets
- Code folding for functions, techniques and passes
- Tab stop display
- Line number display
- External file modification monitoring
- Jump-to-include files
- Properties panel for tweaking shader parameters
- High dynamic range color picker
- Material panel for managing materials
- Display of per-material textures
- Tone mapping for per-material textures
- Easy material creation and management interface
- Hundreds of sample shaders
- NVIDIA Shader Library integration
- Sample projects ranging from simple to complex
- Advanced scene manipulation
- Create and manipulate basic geometric shapes, lights, and
cameras
- Import .3ds, .fbx, .dae, .x, .obj files
- Drag-and-drop light binding
- Drag-and-drop texture binding
- Skinning and animation
- Texture Viewer
- Support for .dds, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .tif
- Drag-and-drop textures onto object materials
- mental mill™ Artist Edition
- Artist-friendly visual shader authoring
- Ability to export to FX Composer via CgFX and HLSL
- Convenient Start Page
- Recent projects
- Quick Start Tutorial
- Quick links to User Guide and other useful documentation
- Single-click access to open effects and create new ones
- Single-click access to open COLLADA documents
- Integrated Shader Performance Tuning via NVIDIA ShaderPerf
2.0
- Support for CgFX, COLLADA FX, and HLSL shaders
- Compare shader techniques across multiple GPUs
- View data in tables or graphs
- See shader throughput, register usage, instruction
counts, and branching performance
- Convenient Pipeline Integration Features
- Semantic and Annotation remapping
- Advanced Scripting Support
- Full Python scripting
- Custom toolbar for scripting support
- Extensible plug-in Architecture with SDK
- Complete COLLADA support
- Project and Asset Management (Project Explorer and
Library Viewer)
- Author COLLADA assets
- Create and remove COLLADA documents
- Move, delete, and copy COLLADA assets across COLLADA
documents
- View COLLADA assets by category
- COLLADA format support
- Material Instance Scene Binding
- Material Instance Vertex Binding
- Skinning
- Triangulation with holes
- Support for rendering COMMON Profiles
- Vertex Stream Remapper
- Conversion of CgFX to COLLADA FX Cg
- Comprehensive Undo/Redo support
- Comprehensive Documentation
- User Guide
- Quick Tutorial
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