Fwd: Depthmap for alpha mapped leaves?

["Thiago Costa" <thiagocosta3d(at)gmail.com>]

Yes you go crazy with overrides...
In theory you can plug new shaders in any part of your tree, leaving
intact the rest of your shader... hosting an entire new branch or
whatever you want. 
This is specially useful if you have a specific shader using
displacement and you want a new surface material on the new pass, but
keeping the displacement... so you can host an entire new surface
connection inside your override (or part of it).
But well it depends on what you are doing... I've attached an image showing how I usually build it up (both trees are the same material).
This is the fastest way I found for that... maybe there's a better way around though.

http://www.thiagocosta.net/temp/override.jpg

On 05/11/2007, Sam Cuttriss < sam(at)janimation.com> wrote:

thats fine when using homogeneous shaders
but as soon as you have a few phongs, a few hair shaders, some sprites, etc etc etc.....
the number of permutations for all the custom overrides becomes obscene.

i may be misunderestimating, but i dont think its possible to do this with one override?

_sam

Sam Cuttriss
Janimation 3D Aficionado

Thiago Costa wrote:

i would LOVE for there to be an option to intervene instead of just override,
ie instead of completely replacing the surface
if you could jkeep all shaders alpha properties and override their rgb.

you can put any part of your shader inside the override... and connect whatever you want.
I usually work on sprite objects overriding the diffuse color of a shader.. or the "input" in the sprite shader, instead of override the entire surface or tree...

On 05/11/2007, Sam Cuttriss <sam(at)janimation.com > wrote:

i would LOVE for there to be an option to intervene instead of just override,
ie instead of completely replacing the surface
if you could jkeep all shaders alpha properties and override their rgb.

_sam

Sam Cuttriss
Janimation 3D Aficionado

Patrick Nethercoat wrote:

give them constant white in the sprite's colour, and put a black volume_fog shader on the pass.

 

Patrick

----- Original Message -----

From: Morten Bartholdy

To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM

Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 4:30 PM

Subject: Depthmap for alpha mapped leaves?

I am doing a jungle shot where many of the plants have alpha sprite mapped leaves. Now I need a depth map, and using etither BA Raylength or scalar state works almost fine with sprites - only problem is a thin line of brighter pixels on the aliased edges of the alpha  - do you guys have any ideas on how I get rid of those?

 

Morten Bartholdy
3D & VFX Artist