Basic HowTo's - Table Of Contents

• Enter the File menu, and click Open. In the file browser, you should see a list of files. Scroll down to 'fire' and double click on the filename.
  

• The box layout for our fire shader will appear on the desk. To render an image, you can either..

  ..use the Render menu's F1 hot key:	..or hit the RENDER button:

• An image window should pop up, showing the rendering 'fire' image:
  

• To look at the shader source code, enter the Render menu, and hit View Shader, or hit the F9 hot key.

• A text window should appear, with the source code in your text editor. (vi(1) is the default text editor, unless you have your EDITOR or STREE_EDITORCMD environment variables set to something else)

There are at least three ways to drop new boxes onto the screen:

The most common way is to use the Desk Menu Bar, selecting the boxes you want by walking the menus in sections.

Another way is to use the Tool Bar.. you can pre-program the toolbar buttons to keep your favorite boxes within easy access. These settings get saved as part of your stree files, so when you load the file, the toolbar remembers your settings.

The third way is the Menu Finder, which brings up an alphabetical listing of all the boxes, that lets you pick boxes alphabetically by name.

Adding Connections

Once you have a couple of boxes on the desk, there are several ways to interconnect them. One way is to click on a button and drag a connection line:

Another way is to simply click/release on each button you want to connect:

Some boxes support multiple inputs, such as Mutliply, Add, and Spline. Such boxes normally have input buttons that have numeric postfixes, ie. B1, B2.

You can create new buttons by doing a click-and-drag on one of these buttons to see an up/down arrow, which lets you create a new button above or below the one you clicked on. These operations are also available from the popup menu for the button; Copy Above/Copy Below.

You can interactively create a new button while making the connection:

Notice that a new 'B2' button is created, and your new connection is hooked up to it. In this case, S, T, and the output of UserDefined are all multiplied together. Since multiplication is communitive, the order of connections makes no difference.

Deleting Connections

If you are making new connections over old ones, the old connections will automatically drop out. However, if you want to selectively delete connections, you can do so by clicking on the lines and hitting Delete:

You can also hold down the SHIFT key to select several lines all at once, and then hit Delete to delete all of them.

If you want to delete all connections to a particular button, you can invoke the popup menu for the button by Right Clicking on the button in question, and choose Delete-> Button Connections: