LAmrUG

Los Angeles mental ray^® User Group

Agenda

7:00-7:30PM Gathering and Intro
7:30-9:00PM Photon Shaders
9:00-10:00PM Contour Shaders Glimpse and Discussion

Notes

Thanks to Digital Dimension for offering up some space on the Valley side for our meeting. It was a smaller gathering, because of our focus on Photon Shaders. However, we did attract some non-technical people who had general interest. We filled the small room, and ran the presentation from a projector attached to a PC running RH9 using Open Office.

After everyone introduced themselves to each other, Bart Gawboy reviewed some of the concepts and terminology of mental ray^® as it pertains to Photon Tracing. Then, we dug deeper into explaining what happens in a photon shader. First, we examined a simple photon shader and the dgs_material_photon shader. We figure that if you know what goes on in the dgs_material_photon shader, you could create any photon shader. Another nice thing is that the source for these shaders comes with any mental ray distribution. And, mental ray provides a good amount of support functions to help you implement any idea you might have. The slides can be found in html form here.

Although, we didn't focus too much on final gathering, the topic did come up since we were discussing global illumination. I think we should have another session on final gathering to keep the discussion going. Also, I think we could add how it relates to Ambient Occlusion, as has been presented recently by ILM at SIGGRAPH.

We took a small break, and Andy Kopra presented the first glimpse of a presentation that he's working on explaining contour shading, and how to effectively use the various contour shaders. It looks promising, and we look forward to seeing it at a meeting soon.