ShaderFX and alpha Mip Maps

GlowingPotato

Hey!

After digging a little bit about Mip Maps and alphas, i found this.
http://the-witness.net/news/2010/09/computing-alpha-mipmaps/

Right now, if I load a dds texture (DXT5 compression) with alpha,and move away from the texture, it will disappear.

Inside the texture node sampler, i found the option to manually adjust the Mip Map levels. It works, but its not definitive solution, but a workaround.

Would be possible to implement this kind of technique using ShaderFX nodes ?

kodde

This sounds interesting. I had a look at it as well and I'm stuck at the State Settings node's drop down list for blend modes. There's only "No Blending", "Pre-multiplied Alpha Blending", "Wireframe" and "Custom".

I suppose you'd want a "Alpha Test" option there.

I'm curious about the "Custom" option. Seems to imply that we could create our own blend state?

shaderfx

Maya VP 2 tends to get unhappy with certain state changes so you can only set those couple options at the moment.

kodde

shaderfx> Does the custom option work? Does it allow us to write our own blend state? How? I don't mind breaking VP2.0 in the name of progress(hopefully)

shaderfx

I don't think it will work.
The other state/blend options are hidden.

You can try playing with them via MEL, but I believe that on the VP2 side when rendering they are ignored and will only end up in the HLSL/CG code.

Mel to be run on the State Node:

shaderfx -sfxnode "ShaderfxShader1" -listProperties [node_uniqueID]

kodde

Thank you Kees,

I'll have a look at those hidden properties and how to work the shaderfx MEL command.