Cool Textures

[colkai]

Ok,
First up, sorry if everyone already knows this, after all, I am bit a slow ;)

If you want some excellent texture additions to LW and can't afford IFW, go to www.darksim.com and download SimbiontLW for free. This gives you access to some Darktree textures and shaders plus you can find other shaders for use with it on the web.

I only just noticed this recently and started playing today - cool!
Being procedurals, they can be a bit slow as they get complex, but they are a worthy addition to the LW arsenal ...and you can't complain about the price.:p

Of course, it maybe that I'm late boarding the train and everyone is already using 'em :D

[Matt]

have seen 'em before, but there were limitations with reflections (I think) i.e. when you add it as a shader it overrides LW, or something, can't remember now!

but I remember there being a reason why I didn't use it!

other that they are great!!!

:)

[John Fornasar]

Being procedurals, they can be a bit slow as they get complex

If you are not animating the procedural, you can either render it once and use it as a map, or try baking it... you should see a nice speed increase.

[cgolchert]

Originally posted by Matt
have seen 'em before, but there were limitations with reflections (I think) i.e. when you add it as a shader it overrides LW, or something, can't remember now!
:)

If you use the shader. There should also be a procedural texture that lets you drop a tree into a channel like color or diffuse...

Most plugin shaders that ACTUALLY do shading calculations replace LW's settings. There is settings to not use the darktree shading calcs inside the shader too.

[colkai]

There is settings to not use the darktree shading calcs inside the shader too.

Yeah, was gonna play with that today, I had also wondered about baking the surface. Do you guys who use LW "for real" ever do this for a still? Or just animations? Is it worth just baking bump, spec, diffuse maps? as this would at least speed up those channels.

I just wondered if the lag of baking for each object means you don't save any time overall for a still. Though naturally I can see how it would save a considerable time baking channels for animations.

Anyhoo, I intend to do some playing with these once I return from hols next week. ;)

[colkai]

So far, it seems as if it reflects ok, but there appear to be bright spots in the raytraced shadows, though upping the ray limit from my measley 2 to 4 helped. (Hey speed ups are good! ;) )
Want to go through the whole transparency / reflect / refract / shadows tests before I commit to using 'em full-on.

Matt, was it the version 7 or the version 6 you had trouble with? They seem to acknowledge problems with the LW6 version.