Indigo Render Export Notes

 

render of the demo scene - click to download the zip archive

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The Demo Scene

The demo scene is a simple room with a hole cut in the wall for the sky light environment to shine through.  The direction of the sky light is determined by a directional light in the scene named "Sky".  It's pivot point is at the origin.  The shapes at the top of the room are mesh emitters, but with their power set too low to show in the image above(see below).  The floor uses a script material downloaded from the Indigo website.  The chair and table have the same simple phong color material.  The 4 ball materials on the table are from left to right: Specular, Specular(alpha), Glossy Transparent and nkdata Phong gold materal.  The scene also uses an exit portal in the window for a more efficient render.

To use the demo scene download and unzip it.  Use the file menu(I didn't test the libraries) to load the scene file into truespace.  Right click the indigo icon or click the "scene package" button in the default aspect of the indigo panel to open the scene packager panel.  Click "unpackage the scene".  Now it should render on your machine.

truespace realtime display and an ies profile light version of the scene

light layers usage shows all layers on and layers 0 and 3(white and blue) turned off

Some usage notes:

Scene material instancing must be on to use the D3D Indigo materials. The Clintons3dplugin.rsx plugin must be loaded for the Indigo exporter to use the D3D Indigo materials.
check manual : chapter 5.3.4 Workflow - Material Instancing: Scene Mode

I prefer to start with the "Edit picked material directly" unchecked.  After all the materials are applied I switch it on to make it easier to make changes to the materials.  The D3D materials must be unique in the eyes of truespace or material merging will occur.  For example you can have to script materials using different files but the truespace material editor won't see the difference and will remove one of them.  Make some change to the color or texture file or some value that effects the Material node to make them unique.

Diffuse Emitter

This image above shows an example of an emitter material.  Any emission value > 0 will make a material emit light.  The final value of the light is determined by the emission value, the color or texture of the material and the constant ambient color.  The base emission value on the node does not do anything.  You choose a light layer by setting an integer value in the layer value.  An emission value of 10000 will not show with a skylight environment, however a value of 100000 will shine bright.  I believe all lights in an indigo scene are normalized somehow so they have to be around the same magnitude in order for one light to not overpower another.

The image above also shows the check boxes for converting a diffuse material to a Diffuse Transmitter and to an Oren-Nayar material.

Glossy Transparent

Above is a part of the Glossy Transparent material.  The absorption is controlled by the solid color shader.  The absorption on the I_Medium node does not do anything.  To change medium types switch to the default aspect of the medium node to use the drop down list for basic, dermis and epidermis.  Most of the medium effects are untested at this time.

The indigo phong ior must be >=1 and is read from Blinn2 node Specular value.

The Specular material is set to transparent if the alphaConstant is less than 1.

Indigo materials can be downloaded from the Indigo website.  They come in 2 file formats, igm and pigm.  Use the "D3Dindigoscript" material to use these materials in the render.  Choose the igm file when editing the material.  The pigm is really a zip file.  Rename the file with a zip extension, unzip it and point to the igm file in the resulting folder.  They have a simple placeholder texture when shown in the truespace viewport. If the downloaded material has image files included you can use the image for a preview instead.

The zip archive contains the installer, an indigoEnvironment node, the rsx plugin, a sample scene, Indigo D3D materials, IMEBank for pure indigo materials, the I_exitportal for converting meshes to exit portals and the I_meshlight for converting meshes to light sources.  When you push the indigo button the panel view will open to the default aspect of the indigo exporter.  Push export and an igs file is written and the indigo application is run to render it.

The indigoEnvironment node should be added to each scene.  It overrides the values from the indigo export panel.

The file dialog for the igs file is a little tricky in that truespace scripting does not have a save dialog, only open.  The process to save is to push the triple dot button, right-click in a blank area of the open view and choose new-text document.  While the file is still highlighted change to the desired name with the igs extension, answer ok to the warning that pops up, click on the new file to select it and push the open button.  The other option is to already have a file with an igs extension and just choose it in the open dialog or manually type a filename into the text field. 

Discovered that Indigo 2 may freeze if you select Hybrid in the render settings.  This is not a problem in the older version 1 Indigo.  Smooth normals, Facet normals and Autofacet normals are written out properly. It looks like the indigo normal smooth flag has to be one/checked before the render engine will see it. 

Create a truespace light and rename it to "Sky" to control the indigo skylight direction.  It's existence will override the environment settings for horizontal and vertical degrees.

The rectangle lights cannot be rotated they always point downward.

Mesh lights must have scene instanced D3D color material.
Use the BlankDXMaterial or one of the color(non-texture) d3d indigo materials.
Place the I_meshlight node inside the object to convert it to a meshlight.
Old information mesh lights are a deprecated feature.  Use emissive materials instead.

To create an ies light create a plane mesh and add the indigoIES node into it.  Click the button to choose the ies profile file.  the light will shine in the direction of the plane's normal.

Place the I_exitportal node inside a mesh to convert it to an exit portal.  Exit portals are generally used to light an interior scene with light from the outside.  The normal of the exit portals faces must point into the interior.

Push the button inside any bumpmap materials to convert the bump to a normal map that will show in the truespace 3d view.  Note that a large image may take a little time to convert. 

Each mesh is limited to one material.

D3D materials will overwrite the indigo bank materials.

The only lights seen by Indigo are environment lights defined in the panel, area lights, emissive materials and mesh lights.

render region and forground alpha renders, the black is the hole of the window opening

To use render region open a 3d view and set the camera to it.  Set the 3d view resolution to match the render resolution settings in the indigo panel.  Push the "select render region button" in the render settings aspect of the indigo panel.  Select the region more than once to get proper values then right click to end the tool.  Check the renderRegion checkbox and render the image.

Click the fgAlpha checkbox and render to get an alpha render.

Diffuse, Diffuse Texture, Phong and Phong Texture materials
Smoothing is controlled in the material instead of the mesh object for D3D materials

The default sphere will give an error.  It seems like they don't have vertex normals so the script crashes when trying to find them.  Workaround is to make a sphere by subdividing a cube or use one of the normals tools on the sphere: autofacet, smooth and facet normal tools.

Not all ies profiles and nkdata files work with indigo.  If it doesn't work try another.

Maybe better to work with bridge off if using truespace with modelside.

More info from the original author here in the Truespace Indigo forums.

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