It sounds like what you're talking about is a sort of "shader wizard"
that just helps you design a shader. This is something we've talked
about for quite a while, as a way to get more people shading despite the
additional complexity of our custom multi-pass shader trees that tend to
change per job. In lieu of actually doing that, we eventually just
implemented a system for translating standard shaders into valid shader
for the current job by creating a library of metadata about how all the
inputs of shaders should be interpreted, even if they have different
names. The problem is that artists still do weird things with the base
shaders that don't really translate into something reasonable and
organized. And sometimes we get things dialed by eye that are just
downright wrong.
Ultimately, what has benefited us far more is to find ways to reduce the
building blocks of the shaders to a smaller set which we can then change
dynamically and have the changes propagate through the job. By doing
this, we reduced the amount of work required to do shading for a job and
were able to leverage more talent and technical prowess per shader than
we could before. Basically, what I'm saying is that there would be
tremendous benefit on even just medium scale productions to having some
sort of macro engine so that the work done by technical types could be
used in an intuitive way by artists within the context of a particular
show. Sort of like if there were an easy interface for creating shader
phenomena (which maybe there will be very soon).
Wizard-like tools would still be very useful for people I'm sure. These
aren't mutually exclusive concepts at all.
-Andy
Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote:
I did not argue for a layer-based approach instead of a tree-based approach, I argued for new tools where the material is described by combining elemental, artistic properties together instead of programming functions. Some of these functions may be complex and a single conceptual connection between two could mean dozens of connections at the low implementation level. For fudging the results, artist might use tools like paint the shadows and highlights in 3D, or position a gradient with a manipulator in the 3D viewport. It just means that the problems are addressed in different ways, not so much based on how it has to be implemented. The tech people always get a sense of panic that power will be taken from them any time these discussions occur, but they generally end up benifiting from additionnal tools to play with, and more time to as the mundane stuff begins to work out-of-the-box. btw I don't know the plans in XSI, but it should be interesting to see how mental ray!
'!
s metaSL will impact the more technical needs.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Leydecker
Hi Luc,
it´s true, everything that can be laid out flat and painted easily
across meshborders without any seams is an artists dream.
But nodes for condition state of an object/selection are as well,
the angle two objects have, the distance in a relation to something
else, the lightintensity at a certain point, the viewingangle
all those
bits also help in getting the best out of that perfect pink nailgloss
painted on previously. It´s also great if you don´t have to repeatedly
refresh it whenever you add a layer, e.g. you share a common
texture support or UV set, picked one, new color done.
I´d therefor really wouldn´t want to limit things to a layer approach.
Actually, I hardly ever layer textures in Maya on a specific channel
but do often layer entire materials, or misuse a material to get the
illuminated areas (including the parts partly occluded by shadow)
as a way to select areas and do another operation on those.
[...]
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