IMHO the material editor should switch to the kind of shading model that
is best for the kind of material you have defined.
As an example, a global pop-down where you can pick the kind of surface
you want (let's say wood) and the right shading model and its parameters
are exposed with friendly names instead of a pastiche of names from
shading model to shading model.
Then we can start to talk about *custom surfaces* where user choice
really are put in place as they are and resembles the way is done now.
Second, and optimisations apart, balancing the lighting in a scene
should be done in a more friendly way instead of digging thru countless
nodes where we don't have even comments available.
I can imagine picking shadows and moving so the light compensates to
generate that shadow i am after.
Or picking a shadow and changing its coloration.
Or picking the whole object and saying, a bit darker, and the parameters
are tweaked without needing to go the render tree.
In a way would be brilliant to have a radical approach like that as the
master plan for the future keeping in mind we want to work on the image,
not PPGs nor rendertrees.
Then again i don't see image analysis tools, like comparing images,
histogrames, luminance viewing, etc... basic tools for any film editor,
why should not this be with us?
This is part of the claim i made about "we are all of use in the
paleolithic of computer graphics" but then may be is that i am becoming
lazy. ;-)
Said this, i am not agains low level access, that is vital and maya
hypershade is the perfect example, so much can be accomplised because
the internals are exposed in a graph that i can't stress enough how much
i would like to have this in XSI.
:-)
hope it makes sense
jb
On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 12:15 -0400, Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote:
> The thing that people often miss is that artists generally aren't going to post on the internet and admit and they just want a material that is 'porous', 'flat', 'oily', like 'old metal', etc, and not spend time trying to coerce a shader tree to do it. They'd just be told they are dumb, and no one likes that. It's hard to defend the point of view that software should "just work".
>
> They are tons of artists not being represented in these debates, and contrarily a complaint I got in response to my earlier post, the majority of CG artists still rely on the classic tools, by adding diffuse, bump, specular, transparency texture maps, in layers. There is nothing backwards or obsolete about these simple materials. IMHO the future in CG material editing would be defining the material by meta-properties. In other words, defining it by how you want it look based on purely artistic properties. Right now, all that everyone is doing is choosing the implementation of some items, or coercing the math to do things, really low-level stuff that doesn't understand nature, it only reflects how ray tracing is implemented. Limitations of the software. With GPU acceleration coming, there should get more performance headroom for more general implementations.
>
> Presently if you get a pre-packaged material, for example an uber-metal preset, either you have a material with hundreds of parameters, or it simply can't do what you want because it's a black box you can't extend with that little extra you need. So in the future I'm thinking one might have something were you choose a general class of material, then add properties like "porousity", "wetness", etc. It might not even be appropriate to have tree-based interface for that, if the relation are as trivial as being a stack of layers. These would necessarily be implemented by some kind of shader tree at the low level, but that's implementation.
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Bernard Lebel
> >
> > I don't understand why you focus so much on the TD vs the artist in
> > the Render Tree, I have spent considerable time writing why I think
> > the Render Tree is an artist tool as much as it is a TD tool. There
> > seem to be no consensus possible.
> >
> >
> >
> > Bernard
> >
> >
> >
> > On 6/28/06, Mike Werckle <stumbly(at)gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Putting nodes together with little connectors just SCREAMS
> > > right brain creativity to me.
>
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Jordi Bares <jordibares(at)the-mill.com>
The Mill
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