I did tests with the fgshooter a few weeks ago on the classroom scene. And yes, its implemention is awful. I used the fgshooter addon too, its way easier then. Btw. I'm also still on the classroom scene and added light and camera animation, but I had no time to finish it yet. My goal is to make it as realistic as possible and bring mentalray onto its knees.:) Of course it has to be flickerfree, what is very hard when the sun is animated and it goes to the horizon resulting in only a few very bright spots in the scene that has to lit the whole room evenly.
-----Original Message----- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 15:36 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Finalgathering made less frustrating: mx_fgshooter Hi guys, there´s a lot to be desired about mental ray´s implementation and user friendliness. I don´t even want to start about having at least an in depth documentation including practical examples. Nevertheless, there´s yet another node that may come in handy but has probably slipped your radar: mip_fgshooter It is supposed to be used to add finalgather calculations from additional cameras to your current frame´s fgmap or your *.fgmap in general. I can´t express how frustrated I am about the implementation in Softimage. If you ever had hoped to having to figure out how to enter 4x4 matrixes and get the thing working yourself, brace for a lot of frustration. Or use this implementation. Thank you Denis Belyatsky! http://maxfoxlab.com/mx_fgshooter.html Hats off. If you push his implementation hard, you´ll notice the camera_shooter_cams will always have to point to the world origin to give realiable values for their resulting 4x4 matrixes entered into the render cam´s mip_fgshooter item list. Sofar, I haven´t been able to verify if that is a limitation of using their [cameraname].kineGlobal as the source for the 4x4 matrix or if that is due to the way the mip_fgshooter node interprets coordinates? In any case, Denis plugin is a great helper in actually making flickerfree FG available to the average user who may sure not be able to derive and properly set a 4x4 matrix himself. In terms of useability, I would have expected mip_fg_shooter to have a list entry field where you pick your cameras and that´s it. Like Lightlinking for selective light, even SRT coordinates would have been better but transform matrixes, really? That´s defeating the whole point of keeping it simple unless one could drag and drop a camera into the Rendertree and at least connect it directly there. Which you can´t... Cheers, tim
