They simplified considerably the problem in Maya DX11: they created one big "uber" realtime shader that does offers all the parameters but it's a black box. You can't render it in mental ray or anything else.
On the Softimage side, the high quality viewport's goal (let's avoid debating for now whether that was a good goal) was to support any arbitrary render tree and the mental ray shaders, and then it uses of course metaSL to compile that, etc. You continue to use the render tree as you're used to. And then you pop open the render region and boom, you have same results raytraced. I'm not familiar enough with the OpenGL realtime shader SDK in XSI to tell if one could write a realtime shader to access use the OpenGL 4.0 tesselation support, but that would be somewhere to look at instead of DX11, unless you actually need DX11 authoring for a game On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Tim Crowson <tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com > wrote: > But the problem with the current display options is that it forces you > into specific workflows for animating characters with displacement. Namely, > that you have to avoid generating any large-form surface changes via > displacement (and sometimes even medium-to-small-scale features as well), > for fear that animation will create surface intersections. If the animators > don't know where the final limit surface is, how will they know if meshes > are intersecting? Not everything can be a sim. > > IMHO, Softimage is a weird creature: it is so elegant and powerful, but > has these frankly rudimentary display options... Even Modo has had GL > displacement, bump, and spec for several years now, without having to > create any realtime shaders. And as politely as I can put it, "High > Quality" viewport is anything but. > > -Tim > >
