Release Notes
3delight is cool!- I just received an email by 3delight and got the permission to use their code in my shaders. These are great news and now I can build a new version very soon.
- I was able to build the first own light shader which uses any shading network input.
- To be more independent from houdinis asad_(all singing and dancing shaders) light shaders, I decieded to do it myself. This way I can handle lights as normal shading networks and it is possible do add any network e.g. to the light color. Well, I have no idea yet how to handle uv coords but I think they will work like normal projections.
- Added light and shadow linking and geometry light is up again after the refactoring of code.
- Added some functionality to partices, what means I simply corrected wrong code and fixes a bug which comes from maya. Have a look at the gallery, I uploaded a small movie which shows some little features. The particles change color over time with a rgbPP attribute, they reflect and refract, the bowl shows a blurry reflection, the floor has a bumpmap with a checker and file texture network. And finally the particles show motionblur.
- I added a list of supported shading nodes here. Because 3delight was a really helpful ressource of shader code, I asked them if they will support me with a usage of some parts of their shading nodes that come with 3delight for maya. As soon as I get an answer, I can say when I will be able to release the next version.
Okay, okay, I know there seems to happen nothing at all, but I'm still here and coding...:
- About 30 shading nodes are supported now, including a base version of the mia_material.
- During the implementation of projection node, I discovered that this nodes does not fit into the shader translation pipeline and shading process. It works fine in a node based environment, but in a monolithic shader system like rsl or vex, all uvs are defined before any other calculation is done. In mentalray I can simply modify the uv's, evaluate a whole network and restore the original uvs back. This does not work in vex. Here at the time when the projection node is evaluated, image data are already calculated from a file or a procedural. This means at this time the projection node has no influence on uv's any more. So I had to find a workaround....
- Rewriting a large part of the code to be more flexible. I plan to implement Aqsis into maya and to do so I seperated some general parts like scene parsing and object creation from the renderer specific parts. This way I will be able to implement a new renderer much quicker.
- A lot of work in my job. This will be finished around 20. November.
- During the work to improve the shader translation I had to rewrite some parts of this part, but now I'm close to the last release again.
Again some interesting updates and new features:
- The HoudiniObjectExporter has mutated to HoudiniObjectTools for some reasons...
- There is a new HoudiniStandin node. With this node you can load houdini geo files as standins. You have the possibility to see a free settable percent of the points contained in the geo/bgeo files as points in the user interface.
- The area lights now can be connected to a geometry and be used as geometry lights this way.
- Normal area lights can now show its geometry and you can choose the standard area light types, line, grid, disc, sphere.
- All lights now have the attribute activeRadius to limit the light influence.
- And finally I implemented commandline rendering via XML renderer description file. Please have a look at the installation page for more information.
A lot of things have changed so I hope it still works.
- Switched from direct geo export to a standalone hcustom exporter. It is more overhead because at the moment the geometry is exported twice, first as a proprietary format called hsff (haggis super file format), then from the houdini standalone to a geo/bgeo format. But its very much faster than before.
- Now particles are supported with some basic features like rgbPP and radiusPP. Other attributes will follow. But I have to learn a lot about shading first...
- The envlight has a bit changed. I now use the good old gi light, maybe this can be changed later.
- Internally I switched the structure a bit in a way that I can support arbitrary render procedures now. the first one is shadowmap creation.
- I had to fix a lot of internal naming to be able to work with referencing and namespaces, but it should work now.
- The AttributeEditor has been removed. The attributes are now initialized with the new extended attributes in Maya2012. This means that a switch to Maya2011 will be hard... and it means that you dont have to assign any attributes to objects or groups.
- The Renderglobals now show a new tab where you can set the mantra geometry output format to ascii or binary (geo/bgeo) and you can set the translator verbosity ( Debug will ouput a lot of useless informations...).
- Batchrendering was broken and works again now.
- And finally a very ( and this means really very, very) basic implementation of fluids now exists.
- Unfortunatly it seems that my geometry converter needs exact the same version of houdini that was used to compile it. At the moment this is Houdini 11.1.22. My tool didnt work if I tried to use another one.
- Added support for displacment mapping
- UV coordinates are now used correctly. This leads to a change in the shader nodes. All of them need a uv vector argument at the very first position.
- Added translucency to the base lambert and phong shaders.
- Fixed a light problem. Now they are reacting to intensity and color again.
- Added Environment Lights. Raytrace background option is still not really working, but the others should work as you can see here or here.
Release 0.03 from 30. July 2011:
- Added support for Phong shader
- Added a Mantra Attribute Interface for an easier way to assign attributes to elements, see Additional Attributes for details.
- Added UI interface for supported objects
- Implemented Reflectionblur and Refractionblur in shader via Additional Attributes
- Renderer now translates reflection and refraction limits from mantra render globals
- Implemented basic curve rendering, its not efficient yet but it works
- Rendering of nurbs curves is now possible (curves movie), but there are no options yet
Release 0.02 from 24. July 2011:
- Added support for mayas particle instancer
- Lights now respect the cast shadow switch
- It is possible to do batchrenderings. Well it was possible in first version too, but I forgot to tell you...
Notes for the very first release from 10. July 2011:
- This is the very first release so expect some crashes and other problems.
- Export of large geometry is awfully slow at the moment, I have some ideas how to improve speed, but it will take a while to implement it.
- Almost no shader are supported until now, this will change
- Only a few features in the mantra render globals really work like sampling, dof, motionblur, renderengine.