Work with hardware shaders

Technique

Often, shaders have more than one mode; for example, they may have modes to support two different video card models. You can adjust the technique in the Attribute Editor.

Shader parameters and shader mesh data

There are two types of extra attributes on CgFX or HLSL materials.

• Varying parameters allow you to select the per-vertex mesh data used by your shader. This includes selecting the UV sets, color sets, tangents and normals your shader will use. By right-clicking on the fields, you can select the data to pass to the shader.
• Uniform parameters are shader specific and dynamically created in Maya. Many of these properties are maps (file textures), lighting and surface characteristics.

In order to use the shader mesh data properly, you must know which of the arrays the shader is expecting what data in.