Tony's right though, it'd be worth finding out a bit more information
about Soft's intentions. Although I would doubt that it would be far
enough towards what you're proposing.
BTW, if you look at the SSS Fast Skin shader, that's basically a material
plugin. It's got various shaders inside it that it connects up to the
various inputs like this:
Connection Material
{
Surface = "deepscatter";
Environment = "env_shader";
Displacement = "dsp_shader";
Lightmap = "lm_write";
}
I'm guessing that this would probably be the best (only) way to hook into
XSI. We'd then have our own interface launched from a button from there,
and store all the custom tree data in a string parameter (probably XML
format) or in a user data blob.
It's not a small job though!
I reckon the FCurve thingy could be made to work in XSI, but you'd
probably have to write your own FCurve implementation, it's own ActiveX
Control, and then link the code to the control via some sort of COM event
system. Nasty, and not something I've tried (funnily enough!).
(BTW, if you're writing C++ shaders in Messiah, there's no reason you
can't create a shader to drive the Histogram COM app to display
information inside Messiah. Such is the beauty of COM ;-) )
Feel free to get in touch directly if you want to discuss this.
Andy
> Hi Andy,
>
> superb! Does your interface rely on the Lightwave SDK or is it completely
> standalone?
> I'm sure this would need some further discussion and testing (especially
> since it shouldn't mimic XSIs tree too closely ;-) )
> I have to do some more reading on such a "base-material" or how this would
> be called in XSI/MR.
>
> Actually your Histogram tool brought me to the idea of external interfaces
> when I found out that I can't use Fcurves for shaders in XSI. :-)
> In messiah I found a pretty cool workaround for the no-Fcurves-in-Shaders
> problem and now I have a shader in my TLHPro package that can use the
> timeline/graph editor with all it's bells and whistles for
> "superfinetuning" of surfaces and other stuff.
>
> Let's see if we can get something going.
> Anyone else interested to join in?
>
> Thanks and best regards,
>
> Thomas Helzle
>
>
>
> On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 23:13:24 +0200, Andy Nicholas <andy(at)andynicholas.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Thomas,
>>
>> I started writing a node interface in OpenGL to mimic XSI's. It was only
>> a
>> beginning, but a good place to start from. At the time I think I was
>> looking
>> to add a node based interface to Lightwave. If we can figure out a way
>> of
>> plugging into XSI, then I'm sure we could get this to work.
>>
>> BTW, isn't it possible to write our own materials now for XSI? Wouldn't
>> that
>> be the best option for complete customisation of the tree?
>>
>> Andy
>
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