ICE Attributes to Mental Ray

[Daniel Brassard]

Idea: Passing ICE Attributes directly to MR via shaders

Let's say we have a shader that it's sole purpose is to read ICE attributes of an object in the scene (like point position). Using that node and it's pair shader Userdata, we pass these attributes to Mental ray via say the geoshader. (Basically an extension of the color node shader.)

A programmer could then read those attributes and program new shaders, not available normally using Softimage.

What I am thinking is a "UserDataBlob" but using ICE.

Do you think this could be useful?
Is it possible to program at this time with the SDK?

Just spitballing // brainstorming here. As always, your response is appreciated

Dan

[grahamef]

Maybe I'm not following you, but the shaders in the Data/Attribute and Data/Map Lookup categories can already read ICE attributes.

[Daniel Brassard]

Maybe I'm not following you, but the shaders in the Data/Attribute and Data/Map Lookup categories can already read ICE attributes.

Thanks Grahamef, i'll be looking at those shader nodes.

What I want to do is use the ICE Attributes to create geoshaders at render time. As an example PTEX on MR are built mainly on CCMesh (although it look like its gonna be extended soon). The CCMesh shaders requires things like a vector list, a vertex list, a name, the number of polygons and the vertex list associated to each polygons, etc. These are attributes that we can get using ICE if we can feed it to MR via a shader.

http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2013 ... clark.html

My code snippet here:

http://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread. ... code-issue

I am thinking along that line.

Dan