In game industry who write those "shaders"?

[kumayu]

I am a game artist learning HLSL by myself
(our 3d engine has no support for shader)
I have some questions about the vertex and pixel shaders developerment.

First,In game industry who write those "shaders"?
Programers or (Technical)Artists?
I hope game artist can write special shader when they need in IDE ,
like Render Monkey , and engine can use fx file as input.
But some programers insist they will write all shaders.....
and don't like the idea.

Do you use Render monkey or Cg composer for writing shader prototype?
How do you integrated those shader developement tools into your game engine? Is it possible use rendermonkey export fx file to game engine?

 

[Demirug]

It all depends (as usual).

In some teams technical artists write the shaders in other teams it is the job of the graphics engineers. The support for FX files and therefore the usage of Effect IDEs depends on the engine. Some use FX files as first class citizens while other can use them or haven’t support at all.

FX files have their limitations. Additional the effect framework that is used to execute these files doesn’t have the best reputation. Another problem is that a single effect from an FX file doesn’t necessary fit into the whole render process very well. If your engine uses a Z pass it need to know how to render objects that make use of thin new effect then. The same is true for shadow maps or other special render targets. FX files can contain such information using annotations but this limits the usage of effect IDE as they can’t provide the infrastructure for some of this special passes.