July 12 2009

minLight

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This flex­i­ble light shader allows the user to con­trol a light’s color and falloff via gra­di­ent con­trols.
Unlike real­is­tic light shaders, min­Light is designed to give the user full con­trol over the color and falloff of a light source by pro­vid­ing ramp con­trols.

minLightminLightminLightminLight

A color gra­di­ent con­trols the light’s falloff, so you could have a light that is white near the source and fades to blue as the dis­tance increases. This can be very use­ful when design­ing a spe­cific look for a scene, even though it is not nec­es­sar­ily a pho­to­re­al­is­tic effect.

min­Light also allows you to con­trol the shadow color with a ramp that works inde­pen­dently of the light’s color ramp.

Usage

Sim­ply plug min­Light into your shader’s light slot, choose a pleas­ing com­bi­na­tion of col­ors and hit render!

June 25 2009

Rendering iridescent coating

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In a free moment I was play­ing around with the iri­des­cent coat­ing fea­ture of my Phys­i­cal­Ma­te­r­ial shader when I noticed I hadn’t posted an exam­ple of this fea­ture yet, so here we go.

Hard surface material with iridescent coating

Notice the soap-​​like coat­ing around the statue. This some­what uncom­mon opti­cal phe­nom­e­non is called iri­des­cence and is, to quote Wikipedia, “caused by mul­ti­ple reflec­tions from multi-​​layered, semi-​​transparent sur­faces in which phase shift and inter­fer­ence of the reflec­tions mod­u­lates the inci­dent light (by ampli­fy­ing or atten­u­at­ing some fre­quen­cies more than others)”.

Right.

Any­way, I built it into my shader because Maxwell’s shad­ing sys­tem offers the fea­ture and that’s what my shader is based on.
Not that I have the slight­est idea what I would per­son­ally use this effect for at the moment, but I’m sure it has its uses in some productions.

May 16 2009

Reptile Shaders

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Rep­tile was born out of the min­Shaders library and includes shaders that deal with pro­ce­du­rally gen­er­at­ing vari­a­tion and diversification.

In many shots an artist needs to cre­ate count­less vari­a­tions of a sin­gle shader so that every object looks slightly dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers. The Rep­tile shaders spare you the has­sle of man­u­ally cre­at­ing the ever so slight vari­a­tions by pro­ce­du­rally gen­er­at­ing any num­ber of per­mu­ta­tions of the object’s attrib­utes and by ran­dom­iz­ing tex­ture attributes.

May 5 2009

Physical Shaders

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Phys­i­cal­Shaders is my col­lec­tion of shaders designed to pro­duce pho­to­re­al­is­tic results based on research of the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of sur­face mate­ri­als and cam­era optics.

The shaders are fine-​​tuned to com­ple­ment each other and offer best results when used in com­bi­na­tion. For exam­ple, using the Phys­i­cal­Cam­era with a Phys­i­cal­Light will by default pro­duce phys­i­cally cor­rect light­ing com­pa­ra­ble to the out­put of a 100W light bulb pho­tographed at ISO 100, f8, 1⁄100.

All shaders expect the scene to be mod­eled to scale for accu­rate results.

May 2 2009

minShaders

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min­Shaders is a col­lec­tion of shaders I devel­oped to facil­i­tate my work as a shad­ing and light­ing artist. Some of these shaders reach as far back as 2003 but remain use­ful even today.

The shaders range from sim­ple util­ity nodes to one-​​off tools for unique prob­lems and con­ve­nient helpers in every­day pro­duc­tion sit­u­a­tions. My more com­plex all-​​round solu­tions for toon shad­ing, ran­dom­iza­tion and phys­i­cally cor­rect shad­ing have been divided into sep­a­rate col­lec­tions for clarity.

Please note that unless there is an obvi­ous down­load link, the shaders are not pub­licly available.

The min­Shaders library cur­rently con­sists of the fol­low­ing shaders:

April 13 2009

minMatcap release

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Here’s a lit­tle treat for every­one look­ing to play with some new shaders in men­tal ray tonight.

I had a lit­tle spare time and I decided to finally begin releas­ing some of my min­Shaders for men­tal ray. I’ll start out with the min­Mat­cap mate­r­ial that can sim­u­late the look of ZBrush’s Mat­cap material.

This is with­out a doubt the most sim­ple shader in my library and as such I guess it doesn’t need much doc­u­men­ta­tion, so it’s a can­di­date for a quick no-​​frills release.

Down­load

Down­load min­Mat­cap (Win­dows x86, x64 and Mac OS X, works in Maya and 3ds max)

The great thing about the shader is that it makes it really sim­ple to achieve a spe­cific look which might oth­er­wise require a com­plex shad­ing and light­ing setup. I don’t know how use­ful this is in every­day pro­duc­tion, but for show­ing off your mod­els it is per­fect.
The library comes with a cou­ple of tex­ture sam­ples that should get you started.

It is how­ever a trade-​​off between flex­i­bil­ity and speed… this shader has no para­me­ters and gath­ers all it’s data from the tex­ture sam­ple. I have been work­ing on a more advanced ver­sion of the shader that offers some more options but for now this is all you’re getting… ;)

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