Category: mental ray > Materials
Shader Family: Surface Material
The mip_rayswitch_advanced and mip_rayswitch utility shaders allow different types of rays to return different results.
The mip_rayswitch_advanced shader works very much like the simple mip_rayswitch shader, but instead of accepting inputs of type "color", it accepts inputs of type "shader". While this does not allow you to assign fixed colors directly, you can set fall-through defaults.
Each of the parameter inputs works in a similar way: eye is the shader for eye rays, transparent for transparency rays, reflection for reflection rays, refraction for refraction rays, and so on.
The difference is that if one of these shaders is not specified, one of the fall-through cases takes over. For example, if none of the secondary ray type shader inputs are specified, and a ray of that type arrives, the any_secondary input acts as a catch-all for any secondary ray types not explicitly set. Similarly, the default parameter input works as a catch-all for every unspecified shader above it.