Possibility of directly accessing V-Ray Materials via .Net (C#)?

[romio82]

Hi All,

this is kind of a follow-up on the scripting vismats thread..
I managed to script an external vrmat and re-import it, but it would be so much easier (especially regarding layer-materials) to work on the material directly within Rhino.

Is there any possibility to acces V-Ray Materials from within Rhino, maybe through .Net and/or rhinocommon?
I guess materials are being stored somewhere as userdata.. Just couldn't find out where/ how to access them.

Any hint anyone ?

[mnewberg]

After the 2.0 release of VRayForRhino .NET API/SDK will be a focus of our development. This API will include new functions not yet seen in other scripting methods that should be able to do what you are looking for. Do you have an example use case for how you plan to edit materials already loaded?

[romio82]

Hi Matt,

thank you for the info! Very much looking forwad to such enhanced .NET possibilities!
Can you give any estimation on when we could expect such enhancements (maybe through nightlies)?

I'm working on a Grasshopper component, which in collaboration with other avaliable components lets you render an animation with moving content. To do so, I'm changing the diffuse texture of a material every other frame..
(until now by saving out a vrmat, changing the bitmap path in there, reapplying the vrmat...).
It works, but it's quite complicated, especially when working with layer materials, which I'm not able to simply modify via the layer table through rhinocommon...
I guess it's not easy/not possible at all to make texture paths changable via scripting, or is it?

I'm anyway happy with your announcement and looking forward to get my hands on it!
Thanks again!
Romuald