The shaders included in the RTX package offer great flexibility – the available parameters allows the modelling of a wide range of surfaces and effects. However, advanced users may wish to program their own custom ray-tracing shaders. For instance this can be useful in order to achieve specific rendering effects or to have more control over rendering. Implementing a custom shader requires the separate OpenRTRT SDK, which is not included in the DirectViz package. With the OpenRTRT SDK you can create shader libraries that can then be used with DirectViz and SoDirectVizGeneralShader SoDirectVizGeneralShader SoDirectVizGeneralShader nodes. Please contact FEI for more information.

Because of the ray-tracing model, implementing OpenRTRT shaders can be much easier than implementing OpenGL shaders – in particular OpenRTRT is much more flexible for integrating and combining shaders in a scene. However creating OpenRTRT shaders still requires a significant amount of expertise in computer graphics, and coding for optimal performance requires expertise as well. Engineering services are available through FEI to assist with customization of DirectViz.