XSIBlog

Stefano is a shader writer and td at Pumpkin-3D, Paris. He previously served Lumiq Studios, Softimage, Phoenix Tools and Action Synthese. He has been working with mental ray since its first release in Softimage 3D.

The standard occlusion shaders sample the environment sending out a bunch of rays, and return a color based on the percentage of rays hitting some objects. Mathematically speaking, they integrate the hemisphere (or the cone) centered above the normal with the given number of samples. As we know, a higher sampling rate gives better results, [...]

Let’’s see how it is possible to texture a spot light’’s color based on the angular distance from the spot direction.

Due to the long rendering times involved, most people prefer to perform motion blur as a post process. Here’’s how you can do so with freely available tools.

Have you ever used Apple’s Shake? Have you ever built macros with Shake? Have you ever wished you could create macros in XSI’s Render Tree?
Well you can, these are called Phenomenon. A Phenomenon is group of shaders exposed to the users as a single entity. You can hide or show, as you see fit, any [...]