looking for any information regarding porting MR shaders to VR

[jbbarnette]

Anyone know anything about doing this?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

What you mean ? As far as I know you plug the same textures in to the same slots in vray shader and just adjust glossiness as they are miles off.

However if you mean coding custom shaders and porting them then no idea...

Thanks, bye.

[jbbarnette]

I meanI have the source code for a MR shader and I want to port the shader and make a Vray version. Not asking about converting a material. completely different things.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Ah yea so U got custom written shader that u want to rewrite for Vray. In that case you need to use Vray SDK I guess. There are few options as far as I remember C++/GLSL etc to do it. U should have Vray SDK on ur HDD in chaos group folder and some docs there too if I'm not wrong.

[reny]

I　would suggest that you start from simple stuff in VRay and work from there.
As MentalRay use C and VRay both uses C++, so in many case it's just difference for setting up entry point and arguments(which vray have plenty examples), and how you map ray context object and following calls from MR to VRay.
( I just checked and MentalRay have also C++ extension, so I don't know if your shader source in C or C++ )

For mental ray you should check this page:
http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2.../chapter3.html
Pay attention to State Variables(where you need to know what your shader did to the ray context and XXXXXX Shaders sections for simple examples.

And for VRay you have to check the examples, which usually requires a material and a BRDF(or multiple).
You can start with samples\vray_plugins\materials\vray_mtldiffuse this example and see if you can convert calls from MR to VRay.
I suggest that you chop off codes from "// from RTMtlInterface" to "// end from RTMtlInterface" from the example, because that section would seriously mess your brain if you are new to writing VRay shaders. :P

That would be all for now, good luck.

[jbbarnette]

It is an animated texture node that outputs one channel that is RGB and one that is scalar.

[vlado]

It is an animated texture node that outputs one channel that is RGB and one that is scalar.

Then just pick the code of one of the sample textures from the V-Ray SDK and rework it to your needs. For example, TexAColor is as simple as it gets.

Best regards,
Vlado