Calculate distance from shading point - how?

[TobyGaines]

I'll probably be needing this in Solaris/Arnold - not sure how much of the work gets done in one or the other 

The distance cutoff in Ambient Occlusion shaders would work, for example, but I need that data before it renders. 

Thanks for any tips! 

 

[haggi]

Since a shading point is calculated only during rendering, there is no way to get this information before rendering. Maybe you need to render a depth pass before rendering and use this in a second one.

[TobyGaines]

Ok so I need distance from polygon - 

 

[haggi]

I suppose it would be easy to create a distance from camera point attribute in sops and promote it to prims and then use this attribute in arnold/solaris. Of course this only works if you have your geometry available in sops.

[TobyGaines]

ugh, so, different objects would have to be in the same sop, in order to calculate the distance btwn them? Not sure if that would work but it's possible - I've also been dreaming of a way to light in the obj context and transfer everything to lops at the last second, since solaris sucks 

[animatrix]

Yes you would have to bring the objects inside the same SOP network for distance computations.