PDA

View Full Version : Anyone with experience writing Max Shaders

XeresRazor
04-20-2005, 11:39 PM
I know this is a bit of an odd request and it may not be doable. I noticed while going through the Mental Ray documentation that comes with Max that MR supports rendertime tesselation of subdivision meshes just as PRMan does, unfortunately this functionality doesn't seem to be exposed inside Max. What I'm wondering is if there's any coding wizards out there that might be able to up a new modifier plugin that can take a mesh and feed it to Mental Ray directly and let MR handle the subdivision, seems like it would save a lot of time by a) preventing Max from having to subdivide to a fixed size and then pass the now large mesh to Mental Ray and b) give nice smoothed surfaces that don't have too much or too little detail as subdivisions generally do when working in Max.
I know that for most of the work I do this single feature would put Mental Ray on par with PRMan for my productions.
DIMO
04-22-2005, 11:51 AM
Hi,
I think it's doable. Chaos did something similar for Vray with the displacement modifier. There's an option "Subdivision" So you can directly render out SubDs with Vray. There are a lot of papers out there for "direct raytracing of subdivision surfaces". I don't know what kind of features are exposed to the max-Mentralray SDK. But you will probably need help from discreet (sorry Autodesk) or Mental Images to get it working properly. I never looked at the MentalRay SDK though.

Best regards,

Dieter Morgenroth
XeresRazor
04-22-2005, 10:47 PM
What I was afraid of, unfortunately my coding skills leave a lot to be desired.
CGTalk Moderation
04-22-2005, 10:47 PM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.