Category: mental ray > Environment
This environment shader is useful for projecting regular patterns onto geometry, such as for surface quality control. The cylinder does not have caps, so it's possible that rays do not hit the cylinder. The cylinder is defined by a transformation which transforms from world to canonical cylinder space, and two scalars that allow cutting off part of the cylinder.
Environment shaders return colors from color textures that are mapped to finite or infinite distances. They are useful for adding background or foreground plates to the rendered scene. Environments must be used for environment shaders, overlays must be used for lens shaders, and textures must be used for texture or material shaders on a plane or other object in the scene.
| Name |
The name of the shader node displayed in the render tree. Enter any name you like, or leave the default. |
| xform |
Transforms from world to canonical cylinder space. The canonical cylinder has the Z axis as the major axis, extends from -1 to +1 on the Z axis, and has a radius of 1. If tex is a procedural texture, texture coordinates are calculated for the intersection point: Z = -1 is mapped to V= 0 and Z = +1 is mapped to V= 1. Texture coordinates for U are calculated counterclockwise around the Z axis where +X is mapped to U= 0 and -X to 0.5. |
| begin |
Specifies the starting angle in radians where the cylinder begins. The angle specification is based on +X = 0 radians. If both begin and end are zero, a full cylinder is selected. |
| end |
Specifies the ending angle where the cylinder body should end. |
| tex |
Displays the texture map to be looked up at the computed coordinate. You can Edit the image clip, or get a New image clip from file or from source. For more information about working with images, see Managing Image Sources & Clips [Data Management]. |
