General use of Shaders

A complete set of tools about using shaders is implemented into SOFA. The three kinds of shaders (vertex and fragments (mandatory), geometry (optional)) are available. Shader is used only for Visual Model as OglModel. The effects of the shader is spread to the associated subtree. Finally, there is only one shader activated for each visual model : if two shaders are present in the same node, only the second will be effective. To simply include a shader, add this into your node :

vertFilename and fragFilename are the only mandatory parameters. Other optional parameters are about geometry shader : geoFilename, geometryInputType, geometryOutputType and geometryVerticesOut. A last parameter, turnOn, is for debugging purpose, when you want to disable shader without restarting the scene. If you want to send values to uniform variables defined into the shader, a certain number of objects is available :

• OglIntVariable,OglInt{2,3,4}Variable : for int and ivec{2,3,4}
• OglFloatVariable,OglFloat{2,3,4}Variable : for float and vec{2,3,4}
• OglIntVectorVariable, OglIntVector{2,3,4}Variable : for arrays of int and ivec{2,3,4}
• OglFloatVectorVariable, OglFloatVector{2,3,4}Variable : for arrays of float and vec{2,3,4}
• OglMatrix{2,3,4}x{2,3,4} : for matrix n*m where n and m = {2,3,4}