Indigo Renderer Forum

Currently its only possible to use ISL in Cindigo with the "ISL shader" node, which is pretty horrible tbh. I want to push ISL to make it usable for artists rather than nerds



There are two ways how this can be done:

1) Implement more shader nodes
for the material editor (like the "ISL shader"), like "ISL FMB", "ISL Perlin", "ISL Checkerboard", "ISL Gradient", "ISL Scratches", etc. AND an "ISL Blend Shader" to make it possible to combine shaders with a few mix modes (additive, multibly, subtract and such, maybe a blend map).

The advantage of this solution is, that it is easy to implement and also combinable with baked C4D shaders, as long as the root shader is an ISL shader (you could throw a C4D noise shader in as blendmap for the "ISL blend shader", for example)


2) XPresso
seems to be just perfect for implementing ISL in C4D because ISL is a functional language and each XPresso node basically represents a function. With XPresso i could bring the whole awesomeness of ISL to C4D, i just have to implement a XPresso node for each ISL function - which is a lot of work.

Advantages are obvious, i think - the disadvantages are that XPresso is not actually an open book for artists and not very visual (yes, its visual, but there are no little shader previews )

Hm.
Hmmmm.

There's a "standalone" material editor coming, right?
Sure it would be nice to have full control inside C4D, but since the C4D shaders are being baked, I see no advantages of coding ISL-Shaders in C4D.

You "need" ISL for computing advanced materials, and this could and should be done in the new standalone material editor. To be honest, I would wish that these mentioned ISL-shaders are visual ergonomically integrated and ready for use there.
However, you could create your advanced ISL material there, and then load them into C4D.

So what is my advantage about being able to create them in Cindigo?
I personally don't see a need for that here.

Perhaps.

First of all, thank you for your honest oppinion

zeitmeister wrote:Hm.
Hmmmm.

There's a "standalone" material editor coming, right?

Yup.

zeitmeister wrote:Sure it would be nice to have full control inside C4D, but since the C4D shaders are being baked, I see no advantages of coding ISL-Shaders in C4D.

advantages:
- shaders are no textures
- 3d shaders
- faster export (way faster - baking textures is slow, especially with resolutions above 2048^2)

zeitmeister wrote:You "need" ISL for computing advanced materials, and this could and should be done in the new standalone material editor. To be honest, I would wish that these mentioned ISL-shaders are visual ergonomically integrated and ready for use there.
However, you could create your advanced ISL material there, and then load them into C4D.

aye, and when you edit the material in c4d, add a texture, remove a texture, the shader just breaks. (texture indices, you know)
also, its not guaranteed that cindigo exports the textures in the same order as the material editor - your shader goes BOOM

zeitmeister wrote:So what is my advantage about being able to create them in Cindigo?
I personally don't see a need for that here.

workflow! working in the familiar environment! ease of use and everything in the same application.

(AND I need something to do, fixing bugs doesnt make me happy )

(AND I need something to do, fixing bugs doesnt make me happy )

Ah, now I understand!

Serious: I didn't recognize the advantages like 3D-shaders... this is a massive option.
So I would vote for implementing the shaders directly instead of XPresso.
It's more ergonomic IMHO.

To me, Xpresso is very visual (fused knows that) and easy to understand, so I'm all for the Xpresso option!
Probably because I don't 100% get the other option, aswell

PureSpider wrote:To me, Xpresso is very visual (fused knows that) and easy to understand, so I'm all for the Xpresso option!

I did expect that you choose XPresso ^^ (and I also expect pixie to choose option 3 )

PureSpider wrote:Probably because I don't 100% get the other option, aswell

Basically the 2nd option means to implement a few shaders, just like the c4d noise, gradient shader, etc. the only difference would be that they can be exported as ISL (sure, i could just interpret C4D's shaders, but that would be confusing: not all shaders can be converted to ISL shaders. as long as the shader has the ISL prefix you know "w00t, i can use that!")
you can just throw them in your albedo texture, exponent, displacement or whereever you want to have them.

The option 2), implementing ISL functions as XPresso nodes seems a lot of work to do... altough it would be very interesting.
I vote for implementing both, but if one options is to be done, I would like to see ISL functions as cindigo nodes.

Cheers!

fused wrote:I did expect that you choose XPresso ^^ (and I also expect pixie to choose option 3 )

Guilty as charged

Finally having some configurable ISL shader for FMB etc. would be a great speed up in setting this stuff up in a scene.

Using Espresso nodes for ISL is a dream come true since ISL was released. You don't need to be a code Geek to get stuff sorted out, and is a really awesome integration into C4D that really improves (C)Indigos professional status.

Even if its some hard work to get it done, having a nice sunny winter in NZ may help motivation wise

fused wrote:(AND I need something to do, fixing bugs doesnt make me happy )

Anyway, I wont stop throwing every single bug I find art you