The first time I looked at that Mental Images page about Mental Mill, I seemed to have missed the pdf about the inner workings (sorry Luc-Eric). Now someone made me aware of it and I really recommend reading it to everyone who is interested in this stuff:
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_4_mentalmill/index.html
And a direct link to the pdf:
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_4_mentalmill/mental_mill_functional_overview-Januar4-2006.pdf
Basically it describes Meta SL, a shader language that creates shaders that work for hardware as well as software rendering.
And Mental Mill is a standalone or integrated shadertree that is able to create metashaders from phenomena with a graphical interface, where you define which in- and outputs you want the user to see.
So it combines "SPDL hacking" like in the current XSI Blog topic with the "grouping" idea we had in this thread before in a graphical interface
It tries to allow high level acces for artist and if you want you can get down into the guts as well.
Depending on the things you use, the shaders will work on consoles or graphics hardware as well as with software rendering or a blend between them, so Meta SL is somehow meant as a language to end all languages for shaders...
Mental Mill is said to be able to export the built shaders to every possible language if needed.
That should become interesting!
Cheers,
Thomas Helzle
If this all works as advertised, is nicely implemented and fited into XSI and is fast, it should answer a lot of the questions.
On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 14:45:20 +0200, Jordi Bares <jordibares(at)the-mill.com> wrote:
> No question it has been a good tool and we still have plenty of road in
> front but my thinking goes in two directions;
>
> 1 - Make it more easy and readable without forcing us to go so granular
> unless we want. Meaning cleverer and optimised mega-shaders that have a
> much broad design and are called thru less obscure names.
>
> 2 - If we need to go down, then bring the lot. A good example of how far
> we could go is VOPs in Houdini, a graphical node-based interface that
> goes as far as you need and with access to everything in the rest of the
> software.
>
> At the end we use our own monolithic shaders like crazy because simply
> we can't do that with phenomena and these building blocks are not
> optimised so render times skyrocket every now and then.
>
> hope that makes it clearer.
>
> jb
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