Soft edge shader

[bjoern-1]

Is there a simple way to create a shader that gives your geometry a soft edge. I know in Softimage, it was a simple thing to do, but I'm not sure how to get the same results in Maya.

[kungkrille]

I know that there is a command found in Edit Polygons-> Normals-> Soften/Harden.
Just select the edges, apply this command and play with the angles.

[red] Maya is Power [/red]

[anim8z]

I assume he means a fuzzy sort of edge (like peach skin), not edge smoothing. I would guess that a post-process type of thing might work, I don't know of a way to do it with the sampler info or anything. Anyone else?

Noxy

[leprico]

Just tfke a SamplerInfo>Facing ratio. It returns cos of angle between Surface Normal & Camera normal.
So returns values from 0 to 1.
Connect Reversed Facing ratio to your shaders Transp. Thats it!

Facing ratio ----> REVERSE ----> Trasnp.

[tbriggs01]

To elaborate, take the facing ratio and feed it into a ramp, v input. Then feed the ramp output to transparency. The bottom of the ramp is the edge value and the top of the ramp is the camera normal value. This is easier to adjust. Just be careful using it. In certain circumstances you may see through an object where you see part of it almost edge-on. You might want to turn off double sided rendering in the flags.

/*In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice they are very different*/

[bjoern-1]

I know of that method, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I guess I'm looking for something similar to a feathering effect you would do in post, but that wouldn't be practicle to render every single object you wish to do that to as a separate layer.