RE: rendermap / lightmap SSS shader

Date : Tue, 27 May 2008 15:19:55 -0500
To : <XSI(at)Softimage.COM>
From : "Matt Lind" <mlind(at)carbinestudios.com>
Subject : RE: rendermap / lightmap SSS shader
Why don't you set Rendermap to use 'scene camera' instead of perpendicular to surface?


Matt

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM 
> [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of peter boeykens
> Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 1:07 PM
> To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: Re: rendermap / lightmap SSS shader
> 
> Thanks for the link.
> 
> I am doing multiple rendermaps with the camera in different 
> positions, and recombining them - this gives me a fairly good result.
> 
> It's just a lot of work - mostly because of the very slow 
> rendering times and instability of rendermap.
> A 2k rendermap is 1.5 hours on average on the stuff I'm 
> working on - regular 2k renders are less than 15 minutes. I'm 
> scripting overnight renders of several rendermaps which helps 
> out a lot - but one night out of two rendermap either 
> crashes, freezes or simply disappears.
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Halfdan Ingvarsson" <hingvars(at)Softimage.COM>
> To: <XSI(at)Softimage.COM>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 5:06 PM
> Subject: RE: rendermap / lightmap SSS shader
> 
> 
> It's not complicated what it does. It's basically a trick 
> they used on 
> Finding Nemo, described in some Siggraph notes, but using the 
> camera's pov, 
> rather than the light's pov. (see: 
> http://graphics.stanford.edu/facecourse/facecloning05/Presenta
> tions/scat.pdf 
>  )
> 
> The lightmap contains the interleaved illumination of the 
> front and back 
> surfaces (+depth of back) as seen from the camera, then the 
> fast_sss shader 
> simply blurs the image samples based on distance, for each 
> sample lookup. 
> This is why this trick won't work in a wraparound mode. If 
> you froze the 
> lightmap and then orbited, the SSS effect would look quite 
> funky where you 
> were viewing perpendicular to what the original camera's 
> sampling position 
> was.
> 
> The only decent way to do it would be something along the 
> lines of what Alan 
> describes.
> 
>  - ½
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM 
> [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of 
> Alan Jones
> Sent: 27-May-2008 10:55
> To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: Re: rendermap / lightmap SSS shader
> 
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:20 PM, peter boeykens 
> <peter_b(at)skynet.be> wrote:
> > For "unsupporting" SSS - this seems lame - as it wouldn't take all
> > that much to get it to work.
> > The downfall is with the lightmap being camera dependent.
> > I dont think that's a limitation of lightmaps - as color sampler
> > lightmap is working with UV space.
> 
> The fast SSS shaders don't do anything akin to an ordinary 
> lightmap in UV 
> space.
> They use lots of strange trickery behind the scenes to do 
> their work and Zap 
> is very tight lipped on their secret sauce used. Don't forget 
> that Halfy is 
> an exceptionally intelligent guy, if there was something on 
> his end he could 
> do to resolve this it would already be done.
> 
> There's nothing stopping you from writing/employing someone 
> to write your 
> own SSS shader which could achieve similar speed using 
> lightmaps by doing 
> some nice trickery to store to a kdtree/bih instead of a UV 
> space texutre 
> and then looking that up within the main shader. It'd be nice 
> and fast and 
> you'd avoid the camera dependency that makes fast SSS so unhappy.
> 
> Though if you use SSS a lot grab a copy of 3Delight - their SSS is 
> absolutely gorgeous, though I've not look at whether they support 
> rendermapping in XSI, though I'm sure Aghiles would be more 
> than happy to 
> provide customers with something that does this within XSI in 
> order to get 
> 3Delight into a new facility.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alan.
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