Hey,
I have been looking for a way to recreate Maya's surfaceLuminance with Arnold nodes, as surfaceLuminance is very heavy to compute, render times double when this node is used.
Blender's Eevee has Shader to RGB node:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/converter/shader_to_rgb.html
Clarisse has an option called "Camera occlusion" - when you camera map a texture, it will map the texture only to unoccluded geo.
https://youtu.be/1cLj0ojlcNM?t=106
Is there a way to make something like this in Arnold? Mind that both Blender's and Clarisse's implementation can work independent from the render camera, so I can manually set it.
If we could specify the camera that aiFacingRatio is computing from this could also do.
Any help and tips are appereciated,
Thanks,
Lucas
No, we are not doing toon shaders, though the show we work on is a bit stylized; we use surfaceLuminance to blend between two textures based on whether the surface is lit or not. I do not think P or dusk mask will help since they do not represent lit areas. Something like Clarisse's way would be ideal - I can control the direction of where the mask is applied by moving the camera, it does not get mapped to occluded elements, thus kind of faking what surfaceLuminance does. Less precise, but that is not a problem.