3.5 Using shaderinfo to Interrogate Shaders

shaderinfo is a utility to interrogate shaders compiled with shaderdl. It could be used as a quick way to see what parameters are needed for a particular shader or it could be used by third party software to build a graphical interface to manipulate shader parameters.

The general command line syntax is:

shaderinfo [options] shader1 shader2 ... shadern

And the following list of options is accepted:

` -d'

Output shader's parameters in a RIB format (see example below)

` -t'

Output shader's parameters in an easy to parse tabular format

` -a'

Output shader's annotations, if available

` --source'

Output shader's source code if the shader was compiled with the `--embed-source' option as described in shaderdl options

` --methods'

Output the name of all the methods in the shader.

` -v'

Output shaderinfo version

` -h'

Print a help screen

A sample run on the `matte' shader gives the following output(12):

% shaderinfo matte
surface "matte"
    "Ka" "uniform float"
                Default value: 1
    "Kd" "uniform float"
                Default value: 1

If the output is intended for parsing, it might be better to use the `-t' option which gives the parameters in the following format:

Line 1

<displacement|volume|surface|lightsource|imager>

Line 2

<shadername>

Line 3

A number `n' specifying the total number of shader parameters

Lines 4 to n+4

'n' lines of output, one for each parameter in the shader. Each line is a comma separated list of fields. Fields are, in order: name, storage, class, type, default space, array length, default value. If there is no default space `<none>' will be used.

Interrogating the `matte' shader with the `-t' option gives the following output:

% shaderinfo -t matte
surface matte
2
Ka,parameter,uniform,float,<none>,0,1
Kd,parameter,uniform,float,<none>,0,1

Shader annotation keys are listable using shaderinfo but this feature is better described in Attaching annotations to shaders.

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