Hi everybody
A couple of slim questions:

- in some old tutorials I always read about TCL expressions on parameters - so far I wasn't able to find a way to do it. All I can find is SLBox - and I can use it on handfull of parameters only. From my understanding TCL is somewhat more powerful than sl. Maybe in new slim they took the TCL funcionalitty out? I find the documentation generally very lacking on lot of subjects.

- a more concrete question - lets say for example that I want to create a custom parameter that would control repeats of all ST coordinates in the slim network and wanted to expose just him in Maya interface so he could control general scale of a shader in the scene. How would one go in to this? Does it mean I have to get my hand dirty and dive into template scripting or there is the way to do it from interface?

Just point me in the general direction...

Thanks in advance

V.

Its not more powerful than sl, it just runs ate rib generation time so it works at different stage.


The sl support in RMS is a bit low compared to what it was in MtoR so you cant just tajke MtoR tutorials and use them as thir face vaue in RMS.


Are you usning MtoR? If so theres a box next to each param that defines how faar its seen and if its of a TCL expression. Likewise if you make the attribute external in RMS then the shader in RMS will show the attribute to the user.

hi joojaa
i'm using rms - and i know about external attributes - but i was wandering if there's a way to connect expressions to S,T repeats parameters ( and to all others). Contrary to hypershade where I can connect almost anything to anything, slim is very restrictive about that area.
Maybe (and i hope) I'm missing something...

Then dont use MtoR tutorials as references. Not the same product, its like trying to compare cars and fish many times. Especially in tihs department MtoR shines over RPS (but rps is MUCH faster in export), on the diowside RMS is still a bit in the unfinished state. We need tio wait for at least rms 2.0 to get it at par with MtoR, as as it is now there slots and lots and lots you can do with mtor you cant do with RMS.

Well, you can connect anything in hypershade but dont expect it to work right for ANY other renderer than maya software. In fact it in most cases dont work like expected. See thing is the external renderers DONT run maya, wich is good aswell because they dont have to speed down for this. However this means that only a very small subset of surfaces.

What often and allmost allways DOES work is connecting a input of maya of what the value was export time so a connection IS valid, but it only computes once since the node itself isnt exported. (whereas maya software does this evaluation on fly so you CAN read in nurns curvature form the nurbs info nodes for example)

And yes you can connect to the shader once its there just like in regular maya! With the limitation that values will passed per frame just like in mentlaray. After ALL the idea of RPS is to bring in MAYA workflow.

So do this:

mark attribute as external, connect the attribute you want to controll inside maya. If you want several surfaces to share the network then you cant use shading switches because they are not supported.

for multiple Instead:

Add a attribute named rmanFyourNameU under your shape (important NOT to transform) of type float, then add a float_primvar in slim and type yourNameU in the box. Repeat for V. there are more types too such as rmanC for color see the online manual on pixars site.

The bonus with this si you COULD use thsi with instanced particles too, as long as you turn color_attr instead.


PS: this is all form memory i have no rps at hand. Just its manual

PPS: got a remote connection to test this. Worked fine. By the way have you cross posted this on pixar support forums. And yes you really dont want to use slim for what you ask here its only what you do when you have more complex assignment issues.

PPPS. Expressions dont even work in mentlaray.

hi joojaa
thanks for the such in depth answer.
i managed to solve at least my st problem (by using one master st node that i expose in maya and under him a separate tiling nodes for each texture - i got what i wanted) and about second part of my question i've got answer on RMStudio boards that i have to get into slim tmpl scripting -
sbunker:
"If the parameters won't connect, it is usually because they are not set to be varying. You need to add detail varying to the parameters in the Slim file - then you can connect stuff to them. "
which i guess was what i expected.
your workflow is very interesting and i'm sure i'll find use for it.
thanks again,
v.