My new shader ‘lcShader’ is almost feature complete. It’s a very close approximation to the Mental Ray mia_material, but in real-time. In testing I’m able to get very realistic looking materials using a standard texture workflow (diffuse, spec, gloss, cubemap). Again, HLSL and CGFX versions will be identical, running the same exact code. Lights react much nicer than previous shaders and have realistic fall-off. And baked shadow maps too.
My shadow map baking script is also nearing completion, it will automatically link raytrace-baked shadow maps to the shader for linked lights and supports transparency in both the shader surface and the shadow cast.
Here is a quick screen grab, HLSL on the left, CGFX on the right. They don’t have the exact same shader settings so some slight differences
I was inspired after seeing RetopoG, but since it is not currently available I decided to make my own tool for Maya.
This tool will let you use Maya’s makeLive features to easily draw new topology on a mesh. The tool is designed to be very simple and rely heavily on Maya’s built-in modeling tools. This is written in pyMel, which only comes pre-installed on Maya 2011 and later.
This is a very early beta-like version, I’ve only just begun to test this in the last few days but it seems workable. I don’t have any plans to include a full custom toolset like RetopoG, you will mostly have to use Maya’s tools.
A short video explaining the tool:
The Relax Verts and Shrink-Wrap Verts are tools based on Oleg Alexander’s oaRelaxVerts.mel
I did some proof of concept work on the new shader and everything looks very positive. In order to broaden compatibility support I’m co-developing a CGFX and HLSL shader. They share most of their code by using #include files and are visually identical. This way people with AMD cards etc. wont be complete out of luck, although Shader Model 3.0 support will always be required.
Here is a quick screen grab, on the left is HLSL on the right CGFX.
Still a long way to go before the shader is feature complete, and the new pyMel UI is another matter.
This is a great time for Feature Requests, I have a ton of things planned, but I’m always open to suggestions.
I know some people were interested in this Photoshop extension tool, I wrote it for a very specific workflow we use at Turbine but if you find it useful all the better. I don’t have any plans to edit or modify the tool.
I’ve made some relatively minor updates to a few shaders, check the dates on the Downloads page. I like to keep things fluid and make rapid changes back and forth. Hopefully I’ll get some time to do a major pass on the Uber and Skin shaders soon.
I posted download links to a tool I made to simplify texturing at work a bit. the lcTextrueSaver is an extension for Photoshop CS4 and 5 that creates a custom folder structure for your PSD and uses that structure to save out RGB+A ‘combinations’ such as Diffuse+Clip, Normals+Specular, etc. It’s a tool mostly set up for the way we do texturing at my job but if you find it useful or inspiring run with it.
As a note on installing Photoshop extensions, make sure you run the Adobe Extension Manager as an Administrator in Windows. (Also I never test this stuff out on Mac so good luck to you guys)
I’ve been doing a lot of pyMel development, I’ll get around to releasing updated tools with these new skills.
EDIT (03/24/2011) – Seems even with my bests attempts although the shader ‘runs’ on AMD cards, normal maps don’t show up. I’m taking the download offline until I can do more testing and hopefully fix the issue.
CGFX in Maya and AMD graphics cards seem to get along very poorly – most often they simply will not work together. CGFX offers a large number of ‘profiles’ under which to compile shaders at runtime and only the arbfp1 and arbvp1 profiles seem to work reliably.
I’ve put together a cut down version of my lcUberShader so that it will run under the arbfp1/arbvp1 profiles. This means that I’ve had to remove a lot of features, for example there are only 2 lights supported, 1 directional and 1 point light. There are no cubemaps supported and currently no glow/incandescence map (although I hope to fit it in at a later time). Also, rendering in the hardware render buffer seems to have problems in the 8-bit alpha mode. But many of the features remain intact and it seems to work well.
I don’t have AMD hardware to test this on but hopefully some of you can give me your feedback.
I’m investigating whether the glslf/glslv profiles could work on AMD hardware, but its not certain. With any luck Maya 2012 will have a new CG compiler and provide better AMD support.
Seems that I had uploaded the incorrect version, this is now fixed. 2.7 uses gp4vp and gp4fp profiles.
