Indigo Renderer Forum

Indigo is hiding a world within: ISL. ISL is the world of procedural textures and materials, bringing shading beyond the limits of textures resolution. Procedural textures and materials means that their parameters are driven by functions, precisely mathematical functions at the lowest level.

Hence a very few amongst the Indigo users can access ISL, provided that they own both the ISL programatic knowledge (syntax) and the mathematical operations it's featuring, in their most generic aspect (both are defined in the pdf).

This thread is where people would share their knowledge and ask their questions on the Indigo Shading Language. Sadly I belong to the second category, so let's join our efforts toward a wider use of ISL !

I hope you like the idea !

- - - -

While I'm fine-tuning the stoneWall textures for an update, I'm thinking that it could be translated into ISL rather easily; by that I mean that the procedure is already layed out in Maya, it needs a translation into a valid code. I'll expose more the next days.

PS: If more users can use ISL then maybe a dedicated forum section will be created !? Meanwhile I did not want to loose that thread in the General forum...

related links:

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... php?t=4428 <<=

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=5221
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=5386
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=4992
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=5233

sounds great! I'm really interested.

That's cool kellpossible

Don't worry, the topic hasn't felt into oblivion yet... It won't last before there comes a true beginning to this, I promise (48h max !).

Sounds great. I'm interested too

+1!

PureSpider wrote:+1!

+2

fallen... Okay, facing the pressure now

I'll go with small pics and brief descriptions if I can , since I can't write isl the aim is to give some schematics to isl writers. The shader will be simple as well at the beginning, for instance it could easily be expanded into distinct blended materials using the displaced mask map, and more fun stuff but that: later.

The Now

The first thing is to provide a tiling mask map, the kind that will be
mapped repeatedly over a surface. At the moment we don't want to consider
providing a mask map without a gradient, we will create such a map later
from this (the gradient could be used too but not at this beginner stage).
Note that black was mapped to red in the examples below for readability:

We are done with bitmaps, now to isl ! We create (sugg) a fbm texture.
Possibly for wall/floor materials all functions could be 2d (uvs supposed to
lay into a regular grid):

This guy above will be used to offset the UVs of the provided mask map
(in U and V; best would be to use a different fbm position to displace
each of (4) [u;-u;v;-v]), resulting into:

Now we can cut the mask in two, black in one hand:

And use this above to blend the two noise textures (or materials) for mortar
and stone. Well we could use the darkest part of the gradient for a blend...

I'm stopping on these basic considerations, there are already a few points to sort out.

Now the isl wizards must fall the mask ;D

This looks interesting
Would be nice to learn how to write isl shaders..

I updated the first post to add some related links, I realise this very thread is somehow redundant so let's not dismiss the essential !

Specially the techique of displacing UVs is exposed here; let's see how the students can put things together

Frankly said I'm busy at different things, I'll have my moments for this. The topic is open !

i might give it a try later on.

glad to see someone pushing on the ISL front, this topic really needs more attention!

you know what would be great? Something like luxrender's implementation of procedural textures in blender, but for all the plugins (su, 3ds, whatever). I think that the blender plugin uses luxrender to render a 2d preview of the procedural instead of using something else?! I have a feeling this may have already been suggested, but good to bring it up again...

I think maxwell has a similar methode with cinema4D. What they do is bake the texture right before rendering.
That makes it able to use all noise filters and such

yes this works fairly well in programs with inbuilt procedurals, but not in sketchup. Plus I think luxrender does it differently, someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think they convert the blender procedurals into luxrender procedurals, and they also have several more of their own. I think it would be great to have something like this to make it easier to beginners learning ISL.

True, i dont know about the luxrender way, but it sounds logical.
What we could do for sketchup users is that we prebuild a libary with some basic isl shaders.
And they get a drop down menu with small renders of a sphere with that shader on.
And they can just click on that sphere and that isl shader will be copied in.

Maybe it sounded like a good idea in my head

It sounds good to me!, and maybe a way to mix and match the different basic shaders for beginners to create their own ... just brainstorming, no Idea if this is remotely possible!