Friday, September 23, 2011

Tesellator.

This is a pair of Maya nodes, first of which adaptively tessellates the input mesh, based on input texture.

This is useful in places where, there is displacement in the scene geometry, and there are dynamics to be done.

What happens the dynamics are calculated before the rendering, While the displacement map is applied during rendering. This give in accurate dynamics with respect to rendering.

So we need to displace the geometry before the dynamics take place. This would mean offsetting the vertices depending on the color of the input at that vertex.

Say, the color at vertex 0 is at black, the color at vertex 1 and vertex 2 is at white. Vertex 1 would be displaced the maximum as compared to black. The tessellator would add divisions to the mesh in between vertex 0 and vertex 1, but not between vertex 1 and vertex 2.

The deformer get the same input texture as the tesellator. and it offsets the vertex along the normals at that vertex. The amount of displacement is defined by the luminance of the color.

After this, just a smooth node for garnishing.

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