Have you tried http://sourceforge.net/projects/hlsl2glsl by the way?
I've tried it. HLSL and GLSL seem to be quite different, particularly in the way data is passed between Vertex and Pixel/Fragment shaders. The code the converter produces is very complicated, confusingly laid-out and really hard to read, so I'm not actually sure if it's working or not. I don't really know enough about either GLSL or HLSL to be able to judge if it's doing the job. So far I've not managed to get any of the VVVV shaders to work in QC. Have to get stuck into that Orange Book (still putting it off)...
I'm quite interested in importing 3D models, and then using GLSL shaders to distort them beyond recognition to get similar results (especially exploding the polys and playing with them). On PC I used to use Pilgrim Pro 3D, which was a pretty cool VJ App, which imported 3ds objects and allowed you to create your own 2D and 3D effects queues using nodes and noodles (similar concept to QC/MAX/PD etc.).
Sounds like a cool application. Having said that, I just had a peek at their website, and there are some terrible screenshots in the Gallery section
E.g. http://memo.tv/thecalling. Around minute 2 it starts with basic primitives and starts deforming until it gets pretty unrecognizable by minute 3 (controlling all parameters with midi sliders and LFOs of course). That was about 3 years ago and it looks quite dated
Still looks good to me. I've always been a sucker for tentacle-like squiggly lines. especially when they move around in time to music. One thing QC really lacks is a nice 3D Bezier line patch. There's the Kineme GLTools Spline plugin, but it's not quite the same.
...so I'm dying to do some more stuff (on much more powerful machines!) When I switched to MAC my main reason to pick VDMX over Module8 was the potential and future expandibility to do this kinda stuff. So its getting closer it seems!
I'm sure you could do all that with GLSL shaders, though there's probably a lot more coding involved. I really would like to get into GLSL stuff myself, but the problem is with QC, because it's so easy to use, I find myself continually being distracted. I have an idea, and it's usually relatively easy to put it together with a few patches, which distracts me from longer-term things like making a start on learning GLSL, or ObjectiveC, for that matter. Ultimately that's just my lack of self-discipline though...
Incidentally, I have a quick question for you, which I will ask off-list, as it's not really related to 3D stuff directly.
alx