CompuServe Thread

Howdy, With respect to your question about better-than-automatic reflection mapping: ANY textured coloration, controlled opacity, refraction and et cetera in 3D Studio (up 'til R4) MUST be done with mapping. It's not a raytracer, as you already recognize, so anytime we want to accurately see THROUGH something or OFF something we actually see the reflected/refracted scene elements applied as maps to the existing geometry. I think you understand this as well. In order to see better reflections, we need something brilliant and innovative, or we need raytracing. There's very little incentive to write raytracer modules for R4 because the renderer is so closely linked to the procedural modelling capabilities of AXPs and SXPs. That is, the developer has to do a lot of work to handle things Studio does for us now in the existing renderer. MAX will fix THAT, I hope. Thus, I think you'll see very little development in terms of raytracer modules for R4 because no one wants to deal with the hassle of handling procedural elements the shader handles now. I think we'll see a pile of rendering plug-ins for MAX. Really. Now, it WOULD be possible to write an AXP that occupies the space occupied by a mesh that maps the surface at render time according to ray-tracing calculations derived from the scene elements and enhanced material properties. In order to make this really useful we'd need to allow for the attachment of two AXPs to the object, so that we could raytrace reflections of the scene onto specific objects that may already be AXP objects themselves…. Sound familiar? Maybe someone with prior experience is already working on that workaround. Remember though that it's not possible to 'tweak' refraction effects without dedicated software, but that it is possible to tweak both existing meshes, map sizes, and options to make reflection mapping work almost like the real thing. Eric Peterson Sisyphus Software

Brian, In MAX the renderer provided is a plug-in, and I was told that there would be many renderers available for use inside MAX, including a ray tracer (I know it's painfully slow.) At that time, someone might be able to make a better reflection map renderer, or maybe you could just bite the bullet and use raytracing (Prepare for your computer to be on for many all-nighters for an animation). Until max, you might look into renderman, which is again, a ray-tracer. But I'm afraid you'll just have to sacrifice "perfect" reflections for reasonable times. Or if you're only doing stills, the time lost is not all that bad. I use POV-RAY for some scenes that need better reflections. It works OK, but I think we'll just have to wait for a major advancement in Mapping technology. – Neil