HLSL shaders

HLSL (High Level Shading Language) shader nodes allow you to create and configure native HLSL hardware shaders in Maya. HLSL is the native shading language of Direct X, and as such, is the preferred shading language for many Direct X based target applications, including games on the XBOX family of consoles. Unlike previous HLSL support in Maya, the HLSL shader provides native Direct X compilation rendering.

To convert an older .fx file to the new .cgfx format, there are conversion utilities available from NVIDIA. Extensive documentation on Cg and CgFX is also available. See www.developer.nvidia.com. [YY: These utilities are no longer available from the NVidia website. I have spoken to Bernard and Tim and we could not find the utilities. I have e-mailed NVidia and they did not reply.]

Basic workflow

The following steps outline the basic workflow to use the HLSL plug-in.

In the scene view, turn on Hardware Texturing.
Load the hlslShader.mll in from the Plug-in Manager.
In Hypershade, create an HLSL Shader material.
In the scene view, assign the HLSL material to an object.
In the Attribute Editor, connect a .fx file to the HLSL Shader material.
Adjust attributes, if necessary.

To create and work with a HLSL shader, see Work with HLSL shaders.

HLSL limitations and other notes

Important information about the CG language including the limitations of the CgFX plugin are available on the nVidia website (www.developer.nvidia.com), especially www.developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html.

HLSL shaders are currently only supported in the default Maya viewport. There is currently no support for the high quality viewport or external renderers.

The HLSL plug-in currently does not support shaders which deform the geometry. These effects will be visible, but artifacts may exist when compositing the DX and GL scene elements together.