compiling shaders

[haggi]

I'm writing some shaders in vex code like I have done before with renderman shaders. With the shader compiler in renderman I get a compiled opcode file. With vcc I get an .vex textfile out of a .vfl file.

So I'm a bit confused how the whole thing works. Are these text vex files read by the renderer and compliled again to use them?

My goal is to create a shader and use it in my ifd file to render it in mantra with the option mantra -f myifdfile.ifd.

My idea was to create a shader library with

vcc -M shaders.otl myshader.vfl

.

Then I load this otl in my ifd file with

ray_loadotl ..../shaders.otl

From my understanding the otl file should contain the compiled shader definitions in a way that I can use them in my ifd file with:

ray_property object name "cubeNode"
ray_property object surface lambert_surface

where lambert_surface is my shader.

Well, this doesent work at all. The shaders cannot be found, errormessages say the path cannot be found.

If I navigate to the directory where the vex files are located, the shaders are found and used, even if I completly remove the ray_loadotl from my ifd file.

My goal is to create a shader library which can be included into the ifd file (or linked) so that I can use the shaders without the .vex files. Is this possible?