Post a Comment On: C0DE517E

An easy question: can fx composer 2 render to a given mipmap level (surface) of a rendertarget texture instead of using only the first one?

Ask this question on NVidia developer forums. Wait. Hope. No reply... Well, never fear! Let's just download the .NET Reflector and try to read the code by ourselves. After a little bit of wandering around (wow, they have quite a few assemblies!), we find FXComposer.Scene.Render.Direct3D.dll, that's a really nice starting point. Class FXRenderDevice_D3D, we're getting closer, SetRenderTarget method, cool, let's disassemble it and we find:

using (Surface surf = target.GetSurfaceLevel(0))

Unfortunately that makes me pretty sure that the answer is no, nope, you can't, doesn't matter if you use SAS or ColladaFX, better luck next time.

Reflection is great. You can use it to gather all kinds of information on your code, or to dynamically create it as well (via Reflection.Emit or CodeDOM, the latter requires the c# compiler). Cool stuff.

P.S. Shame on you NVidia I really do badly need to be able to render to a mipmap level and everyone involved with shadowmaps and/or posteffects (follow that link!) probably have the same needs as well! I'm really disappointed by the new FX composer, you added a lot of functionality but for coders, it's as good or worse than the old one. Also I don't believe that most studios do need all those scene/animation capabilities just because usually, when you have to author a material shader, you test it directly in yor DCC application anyway...

P.P.S. The next step, for the hacker inclinded guy, would be to (if assemblies are not signed) use a debugger to find where the SAS scripting calls the setrendertarget, modify it to parse a surface number, and pass it into the texture that will be set. Everything should be doable within .Net Reflector via the Reflexil and Deblector addins!