Just saw your post and I fully understadn you have nothing to do with the renderer , but in case soemone who deos looks at this.....
good to know they are working on those artifacts, just hope that they don't break something that works in the process.
I would LOVE to be able to turn off the specular highlight for a light.
So if i have a phong material
and I have say three lights and I would like to quickly just use the specular highlight off of one of them but still have the light case from the other 2 .. I can't /
another thing I would like..
I woudl like to easily be able to render out a SPECULAR pass only with an alpha to go with it . If I can now easily I havn't been able to.
Many times I have trims and quick geomtry that looks perfactly smooth in the hardware view , but in order to get the same effect in the renderer I have to crank the tessilation and the render values in order to get the same level of smoothness. Then you go to render diognosic and it tells you they don;t need to be that high, then you go" yea , but did you see what it looked like before i did that??"
(haha)
Like it to take the guess work out of what needs to be cranked and what doesn;t .. its too hard to go through ever damn peice of geometry attribute seettigns to get a clean curve.
Perhaps if the renderer goes to a micopolygon ( is that correct .. can't rember the exact term) level , similar to ,. I believe , that renderman can do that would change ?
the abiltiies to render out ALL particle through my software renderer would speed up things a lot. So even if they had to be hardware renderer it'd just take care of that behind the scenes to it would have the placemnt data to do things like glows andperhaps a texutre that you can't do with the hardware renderer.
generral speed up and less memory useage , espacially with sub-ds or LARGE polygon scenes . We go cad data once that someone wanted to sue a bit of it for backgrounds, and yes we expected it to be difficult to wrok with, but we at lest expected it would render .. it woulnd't out of Maya , kept throwing the ram , we hd to do it in MAX( same computer but MAx could handle it with the same ram) wasn;t worth the itme anyway:)
OK , hope any of that made sense . can't really tell you how to pull any of that off but you asked for a few things .
and having worked with Maya for a long time , I can tell you that the renderer is slow and poor compared to , say the new MAx renderer , XSI's , mental ray, Renderman , Electric Image even .
If you don;t thgink thats the case , take a simialr object , similar textures, spend ruffly the same amout of time with it
( well, not renderman thats takes a little bit to setup)
and rednerer it at simialr quality settings, time it and then look at it.
again, JUST my humble opion backed by nothing tanglable that i can show.. so take it for what its worth and let me know if these features or ablities alrady exsist . And were hidden like a few things in Maya..
I sitll can't beleive that autopaint for PaintFX exists ..but you have to know the mel command to access it.. geez.
I could have use da quick 4 by 4 grid of grass before i elarned htis trick .
Makes me wonder how many more texutre nodes and features are in Maya but hidden from all docs and only given to you by command line codes...
.............