How It Works
You can optionally use your own material FX shader (such as those created by nVidia's FX Composer) in DX Studio.
By using your own shader, you can have full control over the rendering of this material, but will also have to control any lighting of the surface yourself.
The engine will pass in to your shader data based on sematics. e.g.
float4x4 worldViewProj : WORLDVIEWPROJECTION
...will give you a matrix in your shader called worldViewProj tied to the render-time world view projection matrix.
Semantics handled are:-
WORLD - world matrix
VIEW - view matrix
PROJECTION - projection matrix
WORLDVIEW - world * view matrix
WORLDVIEWPROJECTION - world * view * projection matrix
WORLDINVERSE - world matrix inversed
WORLDINVERSETRANSPOSE - world matrix inverted and transposed
VIEWINVERSE - view matrix inversed
TIME - system.timer value
ENVIRONMENT - the current combined cubic environment map 3d texture
AMBIENT - the ambient light color
The nearest two light positions/colors are also passed in as:-
lightPos1, lightColor1, lightPos2, lightColor2
Reference
Just add your .fx file to the resources of the document (and also any .fxh header files it may reference). You can't use directories in header include names, so be sure to remove those from the include lines if used.
Select the .fx file in the Effects section of the Material Properties dialog, and this will override all of the other settings.