Wow Andy, that sounds really interesting and well thought out.
But you are right that it would be a lot of work and I fear I have too much other stuff to do to dive that deep into programming alone.
Also, without knowing what Softs intentions are in this area, it could easily become obsolete before being finished or end up being another welded-on thing like the Texture Layer Editor. :-(
Maybe it is better to stay with something more open from the start and keep my focus on improving messiah, which is so close to being perfect for me, instead of investing too much time in XSI where I don't have that "direct wire" to the development and where I would have to jump through hoops to get a major improvement in the foundation (no pun intended). As someone said, it feels silly to redo the shadertree - as much needed as it may be.
Until then, I may just add some more functionality to the material shader I already have working to make it even more messiah-like. My procedurals already have that input-mixing functionality I need so often.
It could be a cool project for a dedicated plugin developer though - for Lightwave, there were several node-based-trees available, also implemented as shaders, from free to cheap, even before Newtek included nodes in LW 9.
Regarding the Fcurves: in messiah, since the renderer is part of the app, I was able to connect to the Graph Editor with a shader and it works just great. Not intended by the pmG developers but I always love stuff that goes around the initial plans for new uses ;-) (I'm an old style C coder and have no clue about all this new fancy stuff like COM etc. ;-) )
Since Blender came up: Blender actually HAS nodes for shading and compositing in the next upcoming release:
http://www.blender.org/cms/Changes_since_last_ver.727.0.html
If they ever change the Blender UI to something more appealing, I am sure it will become the 3D app of choice for many people. There are already so many cool ideas and possibilities in there. And "Elephants Dream" shows what is possible today with this tool:
http://www.elephantsdream.org/download/
Very impressive!
May be an interesting experience to work with a software where you REALLY can change how things work...
Thank you all for your thoughts and input. It is very much appreciated and has helped me getting a clearer view of the issue, even if actually doing it may be out of my reach at the moment! But maybe someone else is feeling inspired?
Best regards,
Thomas Helzle
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:42:58 +0200, Andy Nicholas <andy(at)andynicholas.com> wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> From what I can remember (and it was a while ago), I'm pretty sure it's
> standalone, and can be put into any HWND you want. It's nowhere near a
> complete node tree interface, but it had a plugin structure so that you
> can add new node types using third party DLLs. it needs a heck of a lot
> more work though (i.e. a refactorisation at minimum or possibly a rewrite)
> to give it the basic functionality you want.
>
> 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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