minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

This sim­ple mate­r­ial shader mim­ics the look of ZBrush’s Mat­cap mate­r­ial. It derives shad­ing and color entirely from a bitmap tex­ture of a spher­i­cal shader ball — these may also be referred to as “lit spheres”. As such this shader does not react to any lights in the scene.

Ver­sion 2 also sup­ports bump map­ping and allows the user to choose between camera-​​oriented shad­ing and fixed world– or object-​​space shad­ing.  It is also pos­si­ble to off­set the tex­tur­ing and con­trol  the shad­ing of back­sided faces.
You can even use min­Mat­cap as a light shader, which may be use­ful to add a lit­tle ambiance into a scene.

Download

Down­load
min­Mat­cap is a free shader for men­tal ray (Win­dows x86/​x64 and Mac OS X)

Usage

The scene’s lights do not affect this shader as it relies solely on the spec­i­fied shader ball. It is best suited to present mod­els with­out the need to cre­ate an intri­cate light­ing setup.
Depend­ing on the shader ball tex­ture min­Mat­cap may be used to sim­u­late reflec­tion map­ping, sub­sur­face scat­ter­ing and var­i­ous other high-​​end effects.