Shaders for 3D Visualization using HOOPS

By Jonathan Girroir, Consulting Engineer, Tech Soft 3D

Video games have pushed graphics card manufacturers to create faster cards with better real-time lighting, texturing and shading effects. The resulting technology of programmable shaders are now being incorporated in almost all workstation (and gaming) quality graphics cards. Using HOOPS, you can leverage programmable shaders to enhance the realism and performance of your engineering application.

Graphics card hardware has undergone a revolution in recent years. Originally, graphic cards’ fixed function pipeline only allowed common shading, lighting and texture effects to be applied to geometry. Driven by the video game industry, graphics card manufacturers developed programmable shader pipelines within their GPUs. Shaders can use custom algorithms to render geometry, vertices or pixels. This programmability allows for a large degree of flexibility within the graphics pipeline to create custom effects, lighting and shading. These effects are easily distributed and displayed in real-time through parallel shader paths with many shaders working together.

Applications using programmable shaders can render vivid 3D scenes with higher performance and more visually accuracy. Self-shadowing, texture mapping, environment mapping, fast transparency, lighting effects, and new rendering modes are just a few of the new capabilities available through HOOPS’ implementation of programmable shaders.

OpenGL and DirectX have similar C-like languages for programming shaders. HOOPS allows application developers to use shaders through simple API calls without having to worry about writing shader-specific code. This allows developers using HOOPS to focus on their core competencies and lets HOOPS to do what it does well: High quality 3D visualization.