Welcome to the MetaSL book forum

[ack]

Welcome to the forum for MetaSL -- Shading Language Tutorial and Reference, a book we're writing at mental images. We'll be making draft versions of chapters and other information about MetaSL that will be available on the book's website, http://www.metasl.org.

We'd like to use this forum to present our thoughts about our strategy for the book and for your feedback about the material we've completed so far. The initial release includes draft versions of the first four chapters as well as reference material from the MetaSL specification. In the future, practical tips for using MetaSL in various applications will also be part of the website.

Andy Kopra
Lutz Kettner

[chisum79]

Hello,

the idea of launching MetaSL.org is great. We try to port some of our C++ shaders to MetaSL and sometimes important informations are missing and we are unable to find it on the web.

We are rendering particle simulations using not only meshes, but we are also shading single particles. We tried to load the particles into the Particle_map which is listed as an Input type in the MetaSL Specs. We get something like:

....
input:
Particle_map MyParticleMap;
....

From the specs this particle map is invalid since the default constructor is called. Even if we do not further use the declared MyParticleMap in the shader and the mi file. We get a warning which states incompatible shader used .. when including the shader msl file and running ray. We use mental ray 3.8.4.5 standalone version with mslc version 1.

We even do not know how to declare what data is stored in the particle map and in which order. It would be great if you can provide an example to this. Any immediate help would be very helpful.

All the best

[ack]

The current support for MetaSL in mental ray does not include particle maps. However, a particle map structure has been added to the mental ray C/C++ API as of 3.9. A shader graph in .mi syntax can mix MetaSL and compiled C/C++ shaders; perhaps you may be able to design an interim solution using such a combination of shaders.

Andy Kopra