Open Source Days 2025

In this session Jacob will present ShadingLanguageX (SLX), an open source shading language that compiles into a MaterialX (.mtlx) file. The language and its compiler were built from the ground up and tailored to the MaterialX specification and its standard node library. Based on the C programming language like many other shading languages, SLX is familiar, with a few novel features such as if and switch expressions instead of statements that are better suited to the underlying MaterialX nodes. SLX supports surface and displacement shader outputs, function and variable declarations, for loops, scope management, arithmetic operators, a standard library of functions, an interactive compiler and more. The compiler takes in an SLX source file and outputs a .mtlx file to be used as you would any other .mtlx file. This allows developers to create more complex networks than is possible using node editors and allows clearer code and faster iterations than using the low-level C++ or python APIs.