reflection distance-falloff

[blue_riviera]

Hi,

I'd like to implement distance-based falloff in my ray-traced reflections in mantra. What it means is to basically fade the reflection component to black based on the length of the reflection ray.

I'm coming from a mental ray shader writing background -- in mental ray you can access all details of a 'child' ray after you traced it (so you can just take the length of the child reflection ray, and use it to fade your resulting reflection component).

I've found the mechanism to pass information between shaders when doing ray-tracing calls (as Mario mentioned, all things described in the gather() function's help also apply to all other ray-trace functions).

For instance when tracing a reflection ray, it is easy to query the ray length in the shader _of the hit surface_. However I'd need that information in my shader (that calls the reflection tracing). In mental ray this is something pretty straightforward. Is this possible in mantra?

thx

imre

[Alanw]

The only way I know to achieve this is by using an exponential falloff in gather() from the reflective surface itself. Maybe you're confusing me, but this is providing "ray length" in the surface that's shooting rays. I honestly don't know any other way to do it.

attached a HIP.

-Alan

exponential_fade.tar.gz

[blue_riviera]

The only way I know to achieve this is by using an exponential falloff in gather() from the reflective surface itself. Maybe you're confusing me, but this is providing "ray length" in the surface that's shooting rays. I honestly don't know any other way to do it.

attached a HIP.

-Alan

thanks for the tip... meanwhile i found what i was after and it was (approximately) the following (i'm not in front of houdini right now) -- something like this:

float ray_length=0.0;
reflectlight( (...) , "ray:length", ray_length);

this returned the length of the reflection ray in ray_length.

i'll check your hip file as soon as i can though... thanks!

imre

[Alanw]

Thats how you would grab the ray length with reflectlight(), but the same thing can be achieved with gather().

My example uses VOPS, but it's essentially doing this.

vector rt = 0, hitc = 0;
float nhits = 0, raylength = 0;

vector reflection_color = 0;

gather(P, R, 0, 1, "Cf", hitc, "ray:length", raylength)
{
	float fade = fadescale*exp(-fadeexp*raylength);
	hitc *= fade;

	rt += hitc;
	nhits += 1;
}

rt /= nhits;

reflection_color = Kr*rt;