Vector Rendering and Textures

[optimusprime]

it so happened that after rendering a scene in Mental Ray i wanted to see the look of it in Vector Rendering and i realized something weird... i could see some irregularity of some of my surfaces... then i realized it was not an irregularity! apparently the vector rendering engine picked up my texture and translated it into te final image! I tried to replicate the process but it worked only in that scene and i am really at a loss because the scene itself was rather complex... but does that means that textures can be used in vector rendering? It was actually a very nice effect because the texture also had sort of a cartoony look which would have been perfect for the scene i have to do and it would save me a great deal in post processing...

Anyone ever managed to do that and can possibly tell me how to do it with more control?

Thanks in advance,

Fabio

[joojaa]

is it possible taht you have mistekenly seen the tesselation of uyour object instead of the texture, becaue you se mr tesselates radicaly different from the vector renderer wich tesselates wierdly, even compared to maya sw render.

[optimusprime]

unlikely, the scene is made of low-poly objects and in particular the objects with the most complex textures have virtually no tessellation since they are all more or less deveoped from cubes...

[joojaa]

well its definitive thet ist not goin to be textured in the maya vector render unless they have rewamped something realy realy much in the 6.5 release. Altough if you had different materials per face it might seem like a tetxure.

[optimusprime]

i use the version 6.0, i can't really explain how that happened.... actually another curious thing is that i tried an experiment and mapped a sky texture on to a sphere and rendered it with maya vector and althought the texture was not defined there were definitely spots and blurs that looked a lot like the texture... the parameters are:

Image Format Options (swf)

Frame Rate 12

Flash Version 5

Appearance Options:

Curve Tolerance 10.000

Detail Level Preset automatic

Detail Level 0

Fill Options:

Fill Style Average Color

Shadows ON

Highlights ON level 8

Reflections ON level 4

Edge Options

Edge Weight Preset Hairline

Edge Weight 0.000

Edge Style Outline

Color Black

Hidden Edges OFF
Edge Detail OFF

[joojaa]

Well in thatcase we can rule tsxture out for sure. Altough it is poossible TO reflect geometry!

[optimusprime]

well by "not defined" i meant it was not neat... sort of like the pre-blur picture that precedes dear old Radiosity implementation into PovRay... or like when you set very low quality preview for textres in maya... you still see the picture thou, it's awfully blurred but it's there. It's definitely clouds on that sphere... but only with polygon mesh fill option turned on...

Sometimes i get this weird feeling that Maya doesn't show every option available for third party implementations and modules... coulnd't it be a bug that's letting out something about the Vector Rendering engine that we are not yet supposed to experiment? I am speculating of course... but heck that would be terribly neat to have some form of translation for textures too! Imagine that you make this awesome object with full textures and when you render it in Vector you get your tectures on your object with a totally cool cartoon look? Talk about Futurama without post processing! (minus the particles of course...)

[joojaa]

Yes offcourse polygon mesh fill evaluates each polygoins centers texture and colors it with the resuunt.. Still not textured tough.

Well you can always diplace the textures tessalete them just before rendertime. (or just noise move them.

[geegrafix]

Actually, in the help files under 'Maya feautres that do not vector render' it says...

'Texture rendering is limited by the Fill Style and the number of polygons. Fill styles that fill individual polygons (Full Color and Mesh Gradient) render textures more accurately than other fill styles, and models that contain more polygons render textures more accurately than models with fewer polygons.'

I am using Maya 5.0.1

[joojaa]

Yes but ist a atexture sampled per polygon, exactly ike i said in post previous to las-! Not a textures like we think of it , or what the user asks more like vertex/face colors, wich we dont still call textures even tough accoring to this logic they would be textures. Not realy paractical for anything!