I have a couple of standard cgfx shaders which I created in Mental Mill that I’ve been using in Softimage’s realtime view for some time.  Softimage 2011 switched the way it uses cgfx files from referencing a file via an FX Shader node to loading them from an application/bin directory.  This is fine and dandy, but I’ve noticed some peculiar things now happening with my lights that render my shaders useless.

In prior versions of Softimage, the lights in the cgfx shader would be interepreted as a set of floats which corresponded to the XYZ position for each light.  It was a simple enough task to drop a light (or object) into the scene and use its position to drive the realtime parameters.

In Softimage 2011, my lights come into the realtime shader as an astonishing array of obscure floats and I have no idea what to do with them or how to tune them.  Each light is comprised of two sets of 34 parameters labelled “transform_internal_to_light” and “transform_light_to_internal.” Two further sets of 34 parameters come in for “__interal_to_light” and “__external_to_light"-- I’m assuming these are generalized parameters not specifically tied to the current lights.

Enclosed is a pic of what the property page for my cgfx shader looks like.

How do I tune these values?  Am I doing something wrong?

Brian.

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As far as i know, softimage shaders environment was rewritten with the release of the 2011 version, to be opened to more customizable and external developers, this has caused some issues regarding shading, like many 3d party shaders didnt work anymore (t2s illumination bundle for example), so when it comes to “unexpected” shading/lighting results, this is the first issue that comes in my mind.

Wait for some AD guy to help, i have no idea.
Also would you please share how you enabled Softimage reading Mental Mill shaders?
I thought that was a 3ds Max feature, how you can use mentall mill shaders into softimage?

Thanks

Can anyone on the Softimage team point out what is happening with these realtime light issues?

Thanks!

I agree with Bkeane. I don’t understand how can I define a light source in Softimage because all of the shaders that I have imported into SI was light independent. So is there any way to use light sources with mental mill exported shaders?

I haven’t tried Mental Mill, and I don’t work a lot with cgfx shaders.

But those are 4x4 transformation matrices that you’re getting in the PPG.

I got a big fish with several fins. For the enveloping I’d like to envelope first the main body with the main bones and then envelope the fins with another group of bones. I’d like to work this way to prevent the small bones to influence the areas of the main body and vice versa. Is there a way to do this or how do I re-weight certain areas to prevent unwanted conflicts between certain bones. I do this for the first time, so I don’t really have a clue.
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I don’t know the answer to your question, but Guillaume here smartly suggested that you should probably try first to make these matrices Identify matrices (i.e. put 1.0 in the diagonal) so that at the very least they don’t black out everything.  After that, you shoudl probably ignore these parameters.. they’re probably internal matrices that shouldn’t be shown in the UI