This brings up a great subject:
We need a good, fast, flexible Toon renderer for XSI. Toon Ink, and
contours in general, are only going to take us so far, especially
after we deal with all the problems stated below.
finalToon from Cebas seems to be
one of the best out there, and having this in XSI would be great.
I'm not holding my breath, though. They seem to be focused mostly
on Max and Maya these days. Still, I did just email them to suggest
they contact Will at Softimage.
Perry
-- "Halfdan Ingvarsson" <hingvars(at)Softimage.COM> wrote:
There is a way of doing it, through embedding the contour
store/contrast shaders in a phenomena tree.
On the surface, it might sound like a good idea, but you'll just end up
with the same problems as the toon lens shader but with a twist. The
contour shading still relies on the point-sampled data, so if there is
undersampling you'll still end up with missing objects and flickering
lines. Dedicated toon rendering engines work from the geometry data
itself and therefore don't suffer from those artefacts of point-sampling.
I can try and dig up some examples and send you off-line, if you're
still willing to pursue it. I don't particularly recommend it though.
- ½
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On
Behalf Of Thomas Helzle
Sent: 30-Nov-06 11:52
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: Custom Contour Shader Questions...
No, but the more I dig into this area, the more it looks like something
complicated, what at first I didn't expect.
Halfdan, could you maybe help me with that?
Is it possible at all?
Thanks a lot!
Thomas Helzle
www.screendream.de
Am 30.11.2006, 17:28 Uhr, schrieb Adrian Lopez
<liquidlightdigital(at)gmail.com>:
> Thomas,
>
> Have you tried contacting Softimage directly about this? This sounds
like a
> deep core issue.
>
> Adrian
>
> On 11/30/06, Thomas Helzle <xsi(at)screendream.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> for an upcoming job, I currently try to look at the contour shaders
in MR.
>> I have built all four required parts (contour store, contrast, material
>> and output) with the shader wizard and have read everything I was
able to
>> find about them, but I am missing one final link:
>> In Max and Maya, there is a place called "Render Globals" where some of
>> those shaders have to be attached. This is not the Render Globals
from the
>> SDK but a place like Output Shaders or Lens Shaders where you plugin
your
>> shader.
>> In XSI there is no such place AFAIK.
>>
>> - Is it possible to use MR Contour shaders in XSI at all?
>> - Where would I attach the store and contrast shaders to?
>> - Am I right in thinking that the Contour Shader itself has to be
attached
>> to the Contour input of the main material node?
>>
>> My goal is, to be able to render contours to a vector format like EPS or
>> SWF for usage in Flash and the contour shaders from mental images
already
>> contain such an example to start from...
>>
>> I heard that the quality of the Contour Shaders output isn't that great,
>> but if possible, I would like to give it a go anyway.
>> One reason being that I ran into a lot of problems with the XSI Toon
>> Shaders over the last 14 days like missing objects in renders just
before
>> another of the unusual regular crashes... The speed is also horrible, so
>> before turning back to Lightwave/Swift 3D, I would like to give
Contours a
>> go.
>>
>> Cheers and thanks for any pointers!
>>
>> Thomas Helzle
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>
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