Mental Ray Shader GUI?

[Saturn]

I like the rendertree of XSI. It's a good way to prototype a shader.
You can download a trial version for 30 days. This is the fundation version

[mixermanic]

Isn't the rendertree intended mainly for realtime shaders though? Which aren't compatible with mental ray shaders.

Cheers!

Martin

[Saturn]

No actually it was designed to make shader with graph.
But you can specify a Realtime Shading Path by using the realtime slot. It was added later and can be very handy if you want to preview in real time let's your lighting,shadows or reflection.

[rendermaniac]

Maya's hypershade also lets you connect Mental Ray shaders together too. I think Houdini lets you do this too (SHOPs? VOPS? not sure which). Houdini's network editor is very nice.

There was something mentioned a while back of a system from Mental Ray called Mental Mill which is meant to have it's own GUI code (I think for other developers to use rather than standalone?), however I haven't heard any more about this.

Which application do you want this for? Or do you want something standalone (which I don't think exists).

Simon

[mixermanic]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Simon - I use Maya and Max. I was looking for something like a GUI frontend for generating code, which would then be compiled in C++.

Cheers!

Martin

[mrgoodbyte]

I believe there is a tool included with Maya 7 (or it's not there with Maya 5) that will take an .mi containing a shader declaration and creates basic .cpp and .h files containing all of the plugs defined in the mi file. I'm not entirely sure what it's called, but you can find it inside the Maya bin directory.
It's not much for a GUI, but it's a start.

-Ronald

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