Yeah, since 601 you can write shaders (I did a test and it's easy enough). They already have a lot of experience with separating the renderer, since they sold it to other companies (I think it's the renderer in the Bentley CAD software if I don't mix things up).
I have to agree that the layer system is cool for small scenes but an absolute pain in the behind for larger things. It is very very easy to get things wrong and then you get 1000 times more things to debug at once than anything XSI can do wrong - it's like having all the shaders of a scene in a single tree - worse in a way .... So I can't imagine Katana/Nuke users putting up with this system, but on the other hand, it should be rather simple to put nodes into the mix, since the basic structure is already there and should work just fine if wired together via nodes - they just seem to think that those layers are a good idea... One other problem with their renderer is, that it can be very hard to get sampling right. I think it's the first renderer I worked with where increasing samples can actually make noise worse, so you not only have one direction to optimize but two and then add in all the local material settings for diffuse reflections etc. For a recent job where I needed brushed anisotropic reflections in a brutally simple scene, I gave up after many many hours of trying to get the noise out. I ended up rendering in Lightwave - fast and in the latest versions very nice AA settings as they should be... ;-) I'm really curious where this will be going. But other than with AD buying XSI, I can see a lot of positive outcomes :-) Two clever parties joining... Cheers, Tom On 25 September 2012 20:12, Steven Caron <[email protected]> wrote: > i am also going to chime in about arnold's scalability, its a beast! > > i have never used modo renderer but have always kept my eye on it, if i > were to do product viz i would probably go for modo. > > but as john knoll said in the interview serguei linked, scalability is > something they will need to address. and if they are supporting katana they > better be ready to render massive scenes. i think we will see modo renderer > get more abstracted from modo application. they need to make a full API in > order to interface properly with katana, scene creation, deferred loading, > procedural plugins, shader api (i think they have this). > > interesting stuff! > steven > > > On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Gene Crucean < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> I agree with Simon. Once you start working on bigger projects or have >> more demands than a single person/seat can handle.... they really start >> separating quite a bit. Arnold IS a beast. It handles anything you throw at >> it and laughs like the count from Sesame Street. Mua ha ha huaaaaa. If you >> are taking about simple test scenes, then the difference isn't quite as >> big... but put them both into a legit VFX studio pipeline and watch the >> weak crumble. >> >> Btw, I'm not putting down Modo's renderer. It's just that scalability is >> a HUGE difference. >> >> Don't get me started on that layer shader system. It's such a >> gimmicky..... and I'll stop here. >> >> >> ... I feel like I'm taking this even more OT. Sorry folks. >> >> >> >>
