We should really just release ours. We'd just have to get it cleared with our CTO. But since I built the original version back in the mid 2000s when I was at PLF, it's probably something we can make happen pretty easily. I think we'll also likely want it out there as reference material for a Fabric based scene assembler.
We also have an event-based script property thing we made recently, which people might find cool. Not earthshattering, but kinda fun, and would let you do the sorting automatically if you want. Re: contribution maps, let's keep in mind that the special sauce that makes that work in Maya is also a big reason Mental Ray became unusable in Maya. They put so much garbage in the MR version of the Maya shading engine that scenes would sometimes render faster in Soft by an order of magnitude. I spent some time at one point trying to get rid of it, but it was so complicated I eventually realized that even if I found a solution there was no way I could enforce it. I even looked into stripping it via a geometry shader at one point. I think they designed contribution maps without raytracing in mind or something. It's not just contribution maps, but the whole "magic maya BS" that they tried to cram in there. MayaGlow and whatnot. Also, as mentioned, they're not the same thing as partitions anyway. I could say people should save some time and not bother learning Maya, but the truth is, it's really valuable for learning what not to do in 3D software. Kind of like how it's important to study history so as not to repeat it. On Saturday, March 8, 2014, Andy Goehler <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mar 08, 2014, at 23:47, Jonah Friedman > <[email protected]<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>> > wrote: > > You manually update them by hitting sort or sort all. Also have a check > function that checks to see if anything is unsorted and report what. > > Sounds like something I'll start implementing on Monday. > > Thanks for the inspiration. > > Andy >
