Something I’ve been really enjoying about PhotoWorks is being able to save your own appearances, those you have modified from pre-existing ones, and then use them in a totally different project. I had a bit of fun altering the colors in one of the marble appearances available in PhotoWorks to create my own funky looking ones. It all starts in the render manager, by right clicking on the appearance I wish to modify and selecting Edit from the menu. In this case, it’s the green marble appearance.
This opens the appearances editor and so I’m able to do modifications to the color and other properties of the appearance. If I want to change one of the current colors in the marble appearance (there’s two of them), for instance, all I have to do is double click on it and a palette of colors will open for me to choose the new color to replace this one with, or create my own custom color.
Just for fun, I choose to replace the light green color with orange and click OK. We can also change other properties, such as transparency, reflectivity and surface finish. Notice the difference in the green marble appearance, and also notice that the color orange is now included in the appearance editor as one of the two colors. It is obvious that this is not the same green marble appearance we began with, but a new custom appearance and as such we need to save it with a new name, rather than overwrite the green marble one we started with. So, in the appearances editor we click on Save Appearances, and then choose a new name and location for our appearance. I’m saving mine in a special folder I had previously created where I keep all my appearances, and I’m giving it the new name green orange marble, to be able to recognize it and use it again.
I can then make my folder visible in the appearances folder in the Task pane, for convenience. My folder appears in blue and inside of it you can find all the appearances I’ve been storing, including the one we just saved, green orange marble.
Now, while modifying colors and properties of pre-existing appearances and being able to save these “new” appearances allows for freedom to customize and be creative, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible at all to modify even more, and create an appearance radically different to the one we started with. For instance, say I want to add a third color to my marble appearance, or make it look like there’s little metallic sparkling pebbles trapped in there. Is it even possible? Well, I asked this same question to Rob Rodriguez not so long ago, and this is what he had to say: “It isn’t possible. The procedural materials are shaders (coded) to have certain properties. You are only able to change the properties PW makes available. This is a common question. Some rendering packages give you much more control over material (appearance) creation but PW does not. This doesn’t mean it won’t be available in the future. SW would need to decide to give the PW user more tools in order for this to happen.” Yup, as a matter of fact, if you open one of those appearances files using Notepad or any other word processor you are likely to find a bunch of code that will look pretty much like this.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any idea how to modify or create code such as this one. I don’t think the average user has that kind of skills. Then, searching for information, I ran into an application called Mental Mill, which is available for download from Mental Images. Mental Mill allows the average user with no programming skills to create custom shaders and export them for rendering in Mental Ray, Maya and even Catia, among others. But, yeah, you guessed it, the shaders created in Mental Mill won’t work in PhotoWorks and it’s because the mental ray libraries PhotoWorks currently uses don't interpret the MetaSL (the intermediate shader language behind it all).
So, although impossible at the moment, perhaps in a not so distant future PhotoWorks users will be given this ability. That would really make PhotoWorks an incredibly powerful rendering software, don’t you agree?






























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