mip_rayswitch

Category: mental ray > Materials

Shader Family: Surface Material

Output: Color

The mip_rayswitch and mip_rayswitch_advanced utility shaders allow different types of rays to return different results. There are many cases in which this can be useful, including but not limited to:

Separating primary and secondary rays into calls to other shader.
Returning a different environment to eye rays (such as a photographic background plate for a screen background), reflection rays (such as a spherical high resolution environment to be seen in reflections) and final gather rays (a filtered environment suitable for lighting the scene).
Limiting time-consuming shaders where they are nearly invisible. For example avoiding a complicated secondary illumination or ambient occlusion shader in the refractions seen through frosted glass.

Render Tree Usage

The Ray Switch shader is a simple shader that accepts a set of color inputs from other shaders to apply for certain classes of rays.

eye	Sets the result for eye (primary) rays.
transparent	Sets the result for transparency rays.
reflection	Sets the result for reflection rays.
refraction	Sets the result for refraction rays.
final gather	Sets the result for final gather rays, as well as any child rays to final gather rays.
environment	Sets the result for environment rays.
shadow	Sets the result for shadow rays.
photon	Sets the result for photon rays.
default	Sets the result for any other ray type. It is not a fall-through default, however, each of the above returns their respective result whether connected to a shader or not (generally 0 0 0 0 black). If you need fall-through defaults, use mip_rayswitch_advanced which is the advanced version of this shader.