"Advanced" Shader Fiddling?

Hello everybody, new here but been doing tech art on and off for the past few years. Last year I spent a long time at work making a new library of shaders for our artists and found working with cgfx in Maya very enjoyable and fairly painless in terms of having to understand very little code apart from the actual shader code.

So now I’m working on a shader project at home and I need to go a bit further than Maya will let me - in particular I would be interested in experimenting with DX10 geometry shaders to create fins along the outline of an object - something like http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10/direct3d/screenshots/samples/FurShellsAndFins.html, although its not for a fur shader). I would also like realtime shadows cast in my scene.

So, my question is whats the best app to use to get access to all the shader goodness with the least amount of fuss?

Maya is too limited as it doesn’t support render-to-texture (AFAIK) so shadowing is out.

I haven’t had much of a try with 3ds max yet, but I’ve read you can use render to texture and also post-process shaders? Is this the case? Does it support DX10 and geometry shaders too?

I’ve had a quick look at FX Composer, but something about it seems utterly hateful and counter-intuitive - also I loaded up the shadow demos and they were all a bit broken which didn’t bode well. However, if other people have had good experiences with it then I would be willing to give it another go!

Or are there any other apps which could help me out?

The other alternative is of course to learn how to write a simple direct x app myself but thats probably biting off a bit more than I would care to chew. Again though I don’t really know how complicated and annoying this would be?

Thanks for any help!

Have you tried Render Monkey? demo version here:
http://ati.amd.com/developer/rendermonkey/downloads.html

Its very similar to FX Composer

Gareth

I have found both FX Composer and Render monkey to be not good enough. And I land up creating a frame work using XNA at the end. At least with that I had control of rendering pipeline. But I did not try the latest Max yet. Max seems lot more friendly with DX so it may be the way to go.