Free Enhance:xsi Special Edition

[SFDD]

Hey RJJ:

Do these textures work independently of the render engine in use? So, in other words, would they work even with the forthcoming 3rd party engines like vRay and Final Render?

[shadersrjj]

Sorry, These are specifically designed for Metalray (i.e. XSI's built in renderer). However, there shouldn't be too much difficulty porting these to third party renderers. For example, a renderman DSO would be quite simply.

RJJ

[thev]

It is not possible to write an XSI procedural texture that would be supported by 3rd party renderers other than mental ray. This is because XSI has no rendering API of its own, but relies entirely on what is provided with mental ray - and obviously, mental ray shaders cannot be used with any other rendering engine. If a texture needs to be used with another render engine in XSI, it must be recoded for that render engine.

This is in contrast to 3ds Max, where the rendering portion is specifically designed for 3ds Max itself and allows other renderers to use it (so any texture designed for the 3ds Max API can be used with any 3ds Max compliant renderer like V-Ray, Brazil etc - but not mental ray).

Best regards,
Vlado

[visualboo]

C'mon Vlado. You're not trying hard enough.

[thev]

I am not even trying and I have no intention to :-)

Best regards,
Vlado

[visualboo]

Your loss I guess.

[SFDD]

It is not possible to write an XSI procedural texture that would be supported by 3rd party renderers other than mental ray.

If this statement is true, then you're saying when vRay makes it XSI, our only options for textures will be bitmaps? No fractal node, no gradients, no nothing like that? Solid colors and bitmaps only?

If this is true, I can't see why any 3rd party render-engine maker would even bother: mental ray will always be the winner.

It would be interesting to hear from the folks at Cebas and Pixar about whether their implementations for XSI also will not support any procedural textures.

[Stoehr]

I don't understand this thread. Are Vlado's words a statement, or an opinion? Is XSI a "Mental Ray Only" environment, or is he being short sighted?

[thev]

XSI is not a mental ray only environment in the sense that another renderer can be integrated and used in place of mental ray - like we are doing with V-Ray for XSI. However, for all rendering components - lights, materials, procedural textures - we must provide our own, V-Ray specific, code to render them.

It is exactly the same situation as with Maya; e.g. we have to re-code all of the Maya shaders, textures, lights etc again from scratch specifically for V-Ray, since we cannot use the ones that are already written for Maya.

Same for XSI - we are re-writing from scratch the procedural shaders that come with XSI since we cannot use the ones that are already written for mental ray.

That does not mean that procedrual textures do not render in V-Ray for Maya or XSI - but they are our own implementations and code, not the ones that come with Maya or XSI. And we are trying to re-implement as many of those components as we can, and match them as closely as we can to their originals, although the exact same result is not always possible.

So my point is, that if someone else writes a shader that works for mental ray in XSI, that means that this shader will work with mental ray and mental ray only. It will not work for V-Ray or renderman or any other renderer right away - they will have to re-code that shader for the specific renderer.

Best regards,
Vlado

[el_diablo]

That is quite logical and expected, however its not a prefered way of things. How does 3D Studio MAX overcome this? Is there a general evaluator for procedurals that returns values to the render engine?

[thev]

Is there a general evaluator for procedurals that returns values to the render engine?Yep. 3ds Max (and Cinema 4D to some extent) defines an API for evaluating textures, materials and lights - which makes it possible for any render engine to use those native components directly.

Best regards,
Vlado

[shadersrjj]

I have just posted a quick video providing an overview of Enhance:XSI. This shows some of the possibilities using Enhance:XSI. The video only uses nodes from the Special Edition (the free edition) so that everyone can follow along.

Look under the tutorials section at:

http://www.shaders.co.uk/enhance_xsi/index.htm

RJJ

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