Softimage Blog

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.

Let’s look at a short technique that will allow you to export any custom function curve or scripting math function to a texturable node to be used in the rendertree.
Let’s get a curve
We start by taking a poly strip, with a 100×1 subdivisions. This will be our “drawing” table. We then make a cluster of [...]

Yes, yet another occlusion technique.

The game is pretending no occlusion nor FG/GI tool is shipping with XSI, and do it with what is left, in particular area lights.
In the end, the result is less accurate than the standard ambient occlusion and FG, but, in some ways, more intuitive and flexible.

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.