About Shader Compounds

 
 
 

In the render tree, you can hook up shaders together and set their values to create an effect. Once you have things set up as you like, you can then create a compound that contains all of these shaders, just as you can with nodes in the ICE tree.

Shader compounds allow you to create an effect and save it in one container, then use it in different scenes or share it with other users. You can expose only the parameters of each shader that you want others to see and adjust.

You can create a shader compound containing any type of shader. The compound can contain many shaders connected together, or just one shader, if you like. For example, you could put a single, large shader into a compound and then expose only a handful of necessary parameters that often need to be set.

There are some shader compounds available in the render tree that you can use and examine to get started, such as in the Particle group for more information. Then follow the steps in Creating a Shader Compound to create your own shader compound. Creating a shader compound is very similar to the process for creating ICE compounds.

In the image below, a simple shader compound is opened up for editing.

Differences Between Shader Compounds and ICE Compounds

Shader compounds are very similar to ICE compounds, so most information about ICE compounds also applies to shader compounds — see Building ICE Compounds.

Here are the main differences: