Ben, I think you did the single most useful node I know of.
Bumpmapping before was a major pain, not only overcomplicated like only true nerds are able to create it, but also unreliable and buggy.
Since you first released it, I haven't done a single bumpmap without ZBump. :-)
Thanks a lot for this shader!
You also gave me a good nudge towards rewriting most of what comes with mental ray.
When I first started with XSI and MR, I was too much in awe and thought that a famous renderer like MR just can't be that weird.
It can, oh yes it can... ;-)
Now with my own material, mixer and some procedurals, rendering is mostly fun again.
I think I owe you a beer! :-)
Thomas Helzle
On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:19:55 +0100, Ben Rogall <brogall(at)excite.com> wrote:
The Zbump node works in internal space, not in UV space, so if the surface looks OK with the texture applied to an illumination channel, then it should also work to produce a bump. The motivation was that bump maps produced in Zbrush would produce artifacts at texture seams even though they looked fine when I put them into a diffuse channel. The way it works is it samples the color data at points on the surface very close to the intersection point. For each intersection point it sends out 4 little probe rays. It hardly seems like the most efficient way to render, but at least it seems to work. It's nice to know people find it useful.Cheers,Ben
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