Mental Mill and Softimage

andy — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:29:01 +0000

If you are already an experienced shader writer, Mental Mill doesn’t have much to offer, auto-generated code won’t appeal. But for TDs who haven’t the experience or time needed to get a shader going, it’s a huge boon. It’s also a way to get a feel for shader code, letting you experiment and see how the code changes as a concept is changed.

Here’s the mental mill blog, with some info for softimage users.

What’s important for everyone to know about Mental Mill is that the same “tree” can be used to generate code for multiple rendering types – with a few caveats, you can create a shader for Mental Ray, a matching realtime shader, and a renderman compliant shader all in one go (ummm, Arnold? Oh well). For softimage users, this can give you custom solutions you can see in both the viewport and at render time. Here’s a video which covers creation of a realtime shader, for instance…

Click here to view the embedded video.

CGFX shaders

andy — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:29:49 +0000

I’ve been playing around with CGFX realtime shaders and mental mill. Here are some basic first shaders. Mental mill makes creating this kind of stuff pretty fast, and you can edit the generated code by hand once you’re in the ballpark.

A simple realtime toon shader for XSI and Maya viewports.

CGFX realtime shader

Basic Blinn CGFX with bump and reflection mapping.

'Wet-look' shader with bump, spec and reflection maps

Spherical harmonic plus dual-spec illumination.

andy moorer » Mental Mill

Mental Mill and Softimage

CGFX shaders