Attached you find a compound that i find very helpfull. It sets up the same Cubic texture Projection in World space for all objects that share the shader. It saves you the time to connect and update your texture projections manually, and it makes complex shaders with lots of different texture projec...

i uploaded a second version of the compound. v1.00 had a wrong connection in the rendertree wich led to a wrong calculation of finalgather intensity if the alternative light falloff was beeing used. It looks like it's working without the SPDL patches even, because the connections are already set up ...

thanks maximus for the link i will defenetly read it. by now i discovered that the compound i posted does not work with final gathering. mia material has the feature that when it only renders specular reflections and not raytraced reflections, it fakes the raytraced reflections by using the light an...

rray, ah now i understand. i guess it is possible though i have never done such a thing and wouldnot know how to do it. for the light itself: i have done a test on an older scene of mine to measure the performance improvements of the features. the renders have a simple light setup. 1 light (the sun)...

rray, i do not quite understand what you mean. once you edit the soft_light.spdl and change the texturabele parameter of the rayshadow from "off" to "on", it lets you plug in textures to that parameter in the softlight node. i myself stumbled over this by pure luck some time ago....

I put together a compound to improve the usability and speed of the SoftLight Node of Mental Ray. Mainly it has four new features: 1. The compound lets you decide if Raytraced Soft Shadows should be considered when precalculating finalgather points, or if during the finalgather calculation the light...

to my knowlege this is a totally unrelated problem to the specular problem that appears from the buggy anisotropy parameter. i actually use the mentioned shader. to illustrate the problem i attached an image that shows a scene setup and 3 renders with the architectural material, the mila shader, and...

something that gave me a lot of troubles in the past was the way the mia material handled specular reflections. i always had the feeling that they where too "soft" in comparison with the raytraced reflections. on top of that, they sometimes seemed to be too dark. i just recently investigat...