iridescent simulation in Maya (Plug-in Writing)

#1

Hi all,
As far as I know maya, we can’t create dymamic texture for iridescent simulation.

First, you can check this page to get better idea about iridescent.
Iridescence is an optical phenomenon characterized in the Oxford English Dictionary as the property of things that “[glitter] or [flash] with colours which change according to the position from which they are viewed,” such as soap bubbles and butterfly wings.

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/sun/Research/Projects/SpecGraphics/specGraphics.html

Somehow it is related much more to physics. Because of the physical construction of the object, there is (are) thin membrane which will generate some physical phenomenon like reflection, refraction and interpolation. And you can see the multi-color when you change the point of view or when the object is moving.

I’m guessing most of the work about iridescent and anything related to physics could be done in the plug-in writing.

But the thing is about the texture baking, or Frame by frame texture. As the camera moving or any movement of object in the scene, the texture will change frame by frame.

Anyone have any suggestion on that?

reb.

#2

Most of the iridescence shaders I’ve found are actually guite simple.
They have a texture (or procedural) map for thickness, which is then multiplied by the dotproduct of the incoming ray and surface normal. Then they just take a sin (or cos, if you will) from the result. The resulting value can then be used as a texture coordinate or whatnot. You might want to reuse the dot product as the other texture coordinate to fade the effect on forward facing surfaces. A good example can be found from nvidia’s cg sdk.

#3

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