Shaders creation for VirtuaLight and 3dStudioMax 4

Description :

VirtualMat is a script written for 3dsMax release 4 (only) and VirtuaLight, the global illumination render engine written by Sir Stephane Marty. Since this render engine is standalone and mainly based on scriptable comportement, descriptions and shaders (like POV, BMRT or RenderMan), i've found useful to write a little tool to evaluate quickly and efficiently the shader capabilities of this engine. In its current status, VirtualMat is not able to reproduce all the features of the Virtualight shader's language and will not be totally because you can do whatever you can imagine and advanced users will always need to edit the shaders manually to add complex features (like in Renderman, one more time). Nevertheless, this tool is useful to setup some basic (and complex too) shaders and provides a very practical way to evaluate them.For more information, check the tutorial page.

Current features (VirtualMat v0.4) :

• 3 new materials in the material editor : Vmat : Plain/Pattern, Functional and Composite
• full support for PlainSurface shaders, including caustics, iridescence, transparency...
• support for PatternSurfaces. All the possibilities are included except alpha channel for SpectrumOfColors.
• Composite shaders up to 5 sub-materials.
• Functional shaders with 3 internal variables, support for Diffuse and Bump bitmap mapping. Possibility to give functional descriptional of 5 variables (Color, Bump, Transparency, Reflection and IntersectionPoint).
• Save at the .vs format. Possibility to save the current material, all the material of the scene or all the material affected to objects. Only VirtualMats can be saved.
• Floating test panel. This panel lets you evaluate quickly and without any other manipulation your shader on different objects. You can use basic objects (sphere, cone, cube) or the selected objectin Max. Plain ground or checked ground. Headlight, 2 lights or skylight illumination. Caustics and GI support.