Does XSI have an image based lighting feature like the one in Lightwave? It produces very cool effects and I'm just wondering if XSI(or Mental Ray) can do this.
Has anyone successfully grown realistic looking grass in XSI? I haven't seen it but would like to do it. I've exhausted every idea short of making a whole bunch of grass blades and planting them one by one.
to question 1:
There is a way, it ist called final gathering.
You only have to take a light with no intensity, and a grid or anything else and give it a constant material. everything in your scene is than lit by our object. You can drive the constant color with a texture.
A nice and quite fast2render effect.
PS: I think you meant this HighDynamicRange Thing. But until now i found now way to use this imageformat.
Sanostol
There is a way to use High Dynamic Range images with XSI. Go to http://www.debevec.orghttp://www.debevec.org and download the HDR images. Luc-Eric Rousseau from Softimage has written a program (HDR2XSI ) which you can use to convert the HDR images to mental image map files for use in XSI. http://pages.infinit.net/lucer/hdrtoxsi.exehttp://pages.infinit.net/lucer/hdrtoxsi.exe
Once converted, use those images on your "FG sphere" to create an HDR like effect.
I've got a section on setting this up and using HDR2XSI on my next set of XSI tapes: http://www.edharriss.com/tape/rendering_lighting.htmhttp://www.edharriss.com/tape/rendering\_lighting.htm
Hope this helps.
Thanx a lot Ed,
I go and check it out right now
Sanostol
Glad I could help.
Thanks for the answers! I'm curious to try this out.