I have a Stingray AO matchbox attached to my camera. Is there a way to exclude individual surfaces from being affected by the AO?
I’m afraid not. At least no easy and intuitive way. This is the biggest and most critical lacking of Camera FX, which is why few ever adopted it. Major bummer.
also, isn’t Stingray End Of Life at the ADSK corporate level too?
I’ve worked around this by just outputting the AO elements I needed, then using different outputs and/or duplicate actions to add back the pieces without AO. Kind of clunky but it can work depending on what you need.
1 Like
Yeah, that is a usable but clunky work around for AO. For many other Camera FX though, they’re not useful since you can’t be selective with them.
1 Like
Thanks! I’m gonna go with a separate AO pass and kludge it together downstream.
There are some ‘hidden’ ways.
If you attach a GMask to the camera
and in the Stingray node go to Shader tab and under selective, there you can set
selective to GMask. In this example I added a bloom and AO,
and only the parts inside the mask will get the effect.
Hope this helps.
(By the way all the other options onder shader I have no idea how to use those, only the
Selective GMask.
4 Likes
This is a bit of a shame if true.
I use some of the matchboxes in batch outside of action. They have a nice feel, play well with linear, look different to the usual sapphire sparks and are fast.
So I see. In fact on Wikipedia it is cited:
In December 2017, citing its inability to compete with Unreal Engine and Unity, Autodesk announced Stingray’s end of sale and development as a standalone product, effective as of January 7, 2018 . 3DS Max Interactive was discontinued on March 30, 2022.
Seemed to me it was a good idea but Unreal took over.
In an ideal world, perhaps it would be great to use different renderers like you can in maya. Redshift or some such.
This is great! Thanks.
ah yes. the 30m acquisition that seemed so promising at the time… in 2014 when the acquisition was announced someone dropped this gem in the Unreal Forums with the press announcement.
it did have some pretty cool features… maybe ADSK did not understand the scope and size of resources to continue develop it and compete with Unreal? hard to believe they didn’t do their homework on this…
