Materials and Shaders

MetaSL Shaders

Softimage ships with many sample MetaSL shaders from NVIDIA. There are a wide range of shaders from high-level phenomena such as thin glass, to low-level nodes for building custom shading trees. They can be found in the MetaSL category of the preset manager.

New Shaders

The following shaders are now available in Softimage:

• mental ray > Texture > mia_exposure_photographic_rev

• mental ray > Material > misss_fast_shader2

• mental ray > Material > misss_fast_shader2_x

• mental ray > Material > misss_mia_skin2_surface_phen

• mental ray > Material > misss_set_normal

• mental ray > Lightmap > misss_lightmap_phen

• mental ray > Material Phenomena > misss_mia_skin2_phen

• mental ray > Material Phenomena > misss_mia_skin2_phen_d

• Realtime > OpenGL > GLSL Actor Envelope shader compound

• Realtime > HLSL > ultimap preview

• Realtime > CgFX > ultimap preview

• Realtime > CgFX > mix_4_layers

For information on the mental ray shaders, see the mental ray Documentation at www.autodesk.com/mentalray-help-2013-enu.

Procedural Textures

The Cell, Fabric, Flagstone, Marble, Rock, Snow, Terrain, and Wood procedural texture shaders have a new Type option:

• Legacy produces the same pattern as in versions prior to Softimage 2013.
• Default produces the same pattern as shown in High Quality display mode.

Cubic Mapping 6

The Cubic Mapping 6 shader has a new option Invert YZ to match the Softimage scene's global reference frame (Y-up instead of Z-up).

Environment Shader

The Transformation parameter of the Environment shader is now texturable, so it can be driven by a connection such as from a Create Transform shader.

Navigating Render Trees

You can quickly pan by clicking and dragging on the background of the view with the middle mouse button. Middle-clicking on a node still branch-selects.

Automatically Deleting Unused Nodes in the Render Tree

There is a new option Automatically Delete Unused Nodes on Refresh in the Render Tree Preferences that automatically deletes unconnected shaders whenever you refresh or close the render tree.

Texture Editor

There are a number of modifications to the texture editor:

• The texture editor preferences are now available from File Preferences in the main Softimage window, as well as from File Preferences in the texture editor itself.
• The options on the Snap have been added to the texture editor preferences.
• Snapping to sample points is on by default.

Updating Multiple Shader Files

The Shader Code Editor has a new Update All button to update all open shader files at once.