Re: MILA shaders in Softimage

[Jason S]

Hi, while of course Arnold solves all of this in a worry free way, the 5 license min can be quite steep. And while Redshift also features that worry free side (with speed and perhaps more affordability), it's not always as customizable and/or flexible. So as RRay pointed to this post here  (also pasted below) on SI-Community, perhaps it may also be of help. Also note that, maybe like with the new easy/fast GI which has proved to be working quite well, at least for diffuse which is the main thing, (indirect secondary Specular having negligible visual contribution anyway) A .dll had to be copied which apparently was a mistake in the SI install script. See Here so perhaps a .dll copy might be in order? Cheers, Mila should be usable in si, also when its not integrated directly. most interesting feature should be the new gi which can run on gpu and the light IS which speed up the rendering with many lights alot. not to mention the now working builtin_ibl. it should be used with the mr env shader "mip_lookup_spherical", otherwise the sampling is noisy like hell, would need a rewrite of the normal si env shader i think (which, i guess, will not happen ). example string for the builtin_ibl: "environment lighting mode" "light" "environment lighting cache" on "environment lighting quality" 0.3 "environment lighting resolution" 512 "environment lighting scale" 1.0 "environment lighting shader samples" 8 "environment lighting shadow" "transparent" for the new gi you can use these strings: "gi gpu" on "gi gpu passes" 4 "gi gpu presample depth" 4 "gi gpu depth" 4 "gi gpu presample density" 0.2 "gi gpu filter" 1.0 "gi gpu rays" 250 and the strings for light IS: "light importance sampling" "all" "light importance sampling quality" 1.0 "light importance sampling variance" "tolerance" "light importance sampling precomp" on quality can be reduced with many lights alot. i had a simpler testscene with several 100 lights and i could use a value of 0.2 that reduces the generated shadow rays alot (classroom testscene with 6 neon arealights rendered 30 percent faster only because of light IS for example). the precomp makes only sense when using textured arealights (which we dont have in si as far as i know, because i cant assign a texture to a normal light, there is no projection, perhaps someone knows a solution?). On 12/12/14 11:07, Sven Constable wrote: Hey list, I had a look at the new mila shaders for mental ray a while back when it was in beta. Quite impressive stuff so far. There are several shader nodes now available in Soft 2015 but whatever I plug together, it renders black. They're not documented in softimage and I didn't find much about it regarding softimage except this: https://elementalray.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/the-layering-library-mila-part -2/ The image with the car was rendered with mila in softimage so it *should* work somehow. I tried it this way: www.imagefront.de/tmp/soft-mila.JPG As I understand it, the 'diffuse reflection' with MILA is what we usually call 'diffuse color'. I tried other nodes but it always renders black. Does anyone got the mila shaders to work with Softimage 2015? Thanks and have a nice weekend, sven