Re: "renderer selector" shader node?

["Thomas Helzle" <thomashelzle(at)gmail.com>]

Yes, I think that would be the way to implement it.
Select the rendertree that is used by the renderer selected for the pass so you can easily switch between different renderers (for instance for a fast preview/region in MR and a final rendering in Fry)

Fryrender already converts Phong etc. to it's internal settings, but the principle of surfacing and other stuff in Fry is so much different from the faked Raytracing stuff in MR, that the native Fry Material node in the Rendertree basically just saves the settings you make in the native Fry Material Editor. Since Fry supports a lot of 3D Software (VERY different ones), I don't think it would be possible for them to convert each and every nodes output in every app.

But I think they did a very good job with the integration. At least I like it ;-)
Can't wait for their RC1 release :-)

Cheers!

Thomas Helzle

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Thiago Costa <thiagocosta3d(at)gmail.com> wrote:

cool
good to know that fryrender is implementing something like this...

If we had a way to work it out like layers, where you could specify that it's just used with X renderer, would be awesome.
Maybe layers is not the right thing to call it, maybe another level under the material level where you could specify a submaterial. If that's possible to understand... :)

Pretty much like the way realtime-nodes/mentalray nodes already work in the rendertree.. but opening this for 3rd party render engines to add their own call.

Cheers,

Thiago

2008/5/5 Thomas Helzle <thomashelzle(at)gmail.com>:

I had exactly the same desire. :-)
I was able to convince the developers of Fryrender (http://www.fryrender.com) to implement such a possibility into their next update (not out yet). Since they use the rendertree in a non-standard way to save their own material descriptions, it seems to be impossible to have a general splitshader with the current XSI/MR SDK that would work for them.
But they will have a MR-connection on their own material shader where one can plug in a standard MR shadertree which should work in the renderregion when set to MR.

But it would be very nice to have a separate input on the main material node for every installed/used renderer so such workarounds wouldn't be necessary...

Cheers,

Thomas

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 2:00 AM, Thiago Costa <thiagocosta3d(at)gmail.com> wrote:

Don't know if this is a good idea or not...
I've been trying these new renderers for XSI and they are all great.
So is there a way of Softimage or one of this companies develop a shader where you can plug two different
shader networks, where one network would be active for renderer "A" and another for renderer "B"?

I mean.. lets say you have a vRay material, it's all great but it render just a gray nothing with Mentalray.
Wouldn't be good if we could have two networks in the same shader where you could select which network is called for that specific renderer at rendertime?

I know pass overrides are there... but well, this would help on this new mix of render engines. if anybody is planning to have a pipeline with that...
I don't recall any other software that has a shader like this, so maybe it's just a bad idea... or maybe it's a good thing for XSI users and this new era of
one render engine per viewport that is coming...
Would be hard to code that? I'm still bad with shader development...

Thanks.

Thiago Costa