The Academy Software Foundation is excited to announce the addition of a Slang shader generator to the MaterialX ecosystem! Developed by NVIDIA and now maintained by The Khronos® Group, Slang™ is an open-source shading language and compiler, built on 15 years of research, development, and deployment experience. Slang is designed to address the evolving needs of real-time graphics developers, especially those working with large-scale shader codebases. By supporting modular development with features like modules, interfaces, and generics, Slang simplifies shader creation and maintenance while significantly reducing compilation times.
Moving forward, this addition enhances MaterialX’s capabilities for advanced graphics pipelines and strengthens its position as a universal standard for material definitions. The new backend provides developers with a powerful, unified path for leveraging MaterialX data in next-generation workflows.
This addition also enables the integration of machine learning and inverse rendering workflows into the MaterialX and OpenUSD ecosystem. By generating Slang code, MaterialX will be able to leverage the inherent differentiable rendering capabilities of the Slang infrastructure. This capability is a critical step in bridging standardized look-development with ML-driven production tools. And in the future, this development offers the MaterialX project the option to offload the complexity of generating target shading code (e.g., GLSL, HLSL, MSL, and WGSL) to the Slang compiler itself. Slang can act as a unified infrastructure layer, simplifying maintenance and accelerating support for diverse modern graphics pipelines.
“Support for Slang shader generation in MaterialX represents an important step forward for machine learning and inverse rendering workflows in the MaterialX and OpenUSD ecosystem. It’s been a great experience working with Khronos and NVIDIA on this integration, and we’re looking forward to future collaborations between our teams,” said Jonathan Stone, MaterialX Lead Developer and Chair, and Lead Rendering Engineer in the Lucasfilm ADG.
“Bringing Slang into MaterialX is about much more than just code generation; it’s about unlocking a new class of graphics workflows. By enabling differentiable shaders within the MaterialX ecosystem, we’re opening the door for neural and inverse rendering techniques that were previously incredibly difficult to implement. This connects the industry standard for materials directly to the bleeding edge of machine learning-driven graphics,” added Shannon Woods, Slang Working Group Chair.
Bringing MaterialX’s rich, standardized library of nodes and definitions into the Slang world offers developers a robust mechanism for building and deploying cross-platform rendering engines with reduced friction. We encourage the community to explore this new capability and its potential to unlock next-generation material visualization and processing.
Developers interested in Slang can join their Discord here or visit the https://shader-slang.org/. Learn more about MaterialX here.
