Stardust is a Mental Ray (others renderers are currently in dev) for Maya plugin ( Windows 7/8 & Maya 64-bits 2008-2015).
Multiple projections matte-painting and camera/photo mapping made easy.
Stardust is a matte-painting tool with unique features as to photographs mapping.
[ul]As a matte-painting tool, it allows to automatically map multiple objects with any kind of projections (planar, cylindrical, spherical, camera, ball ). Projections are automatically occluded and mixed. Also, you can provide up to 6 optional textures, so you can project and blend in a single step corresponding texture maps like diffuse, specular, bump/normal, ect…
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[ul]When used with photographs, it attempts to recalculate at run time the correct pixel diffuse and specular components from the photographs and the geometry. This allows for automatic and easy blending of photographs with highlights and reflections or to compute renders with specular. This is really a must-have when you’re working with background plates or set reconstruction.
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[ul]An interesting trick is that you can define 3D mattes applying to all of your textures in a single step by turning off the primary visibility of objects.
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[ul]Till others renderers than mental Ray be added, it’s always possible to bake your textures to UV sets and then switch to other renderer.
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Stardust has also planned features:
[ul]Import routines from most popular photogrammetry/structure-from-motion and matchmoving software
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[ul]Lens shader and scripted routines matching Stardust projections (planar, cylindrical, spherical, camera, ball) to easily render base texture maps.
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Please, feel free to leave comments, suggest which platform/renderer would interest you. Also rate it so that I know you’re interested in! If you like it, please spread it with your friends or colleagues.
An Arnold version is also planned by the end of April/beginning of May 2015.
For more information, detailed installation and help or purchase, check my website:
https://sites.google.com/site/eddy3ree/stardust
Stardust implements 2 shading nodes, the X3stardustProj projection node and the X3stardust projection mixer node:
Thanks for reading,
Eddy.