Omar Espinosa Rojas

Hello wizards!

I have a shader/vex question regarding the refraction shader.
So I have this very non conventional render where I am rendering a water cylinder with a custom lens shader. Doing kind of an inwards cylindrical camera.
The goal is to place this render on a cylindrical display. So at the beginning the idea was to be able to see the other side of the water but now, it was decided to remove it completely.

So I said ok, I can reduce the clipping plane of the camera that should get rid of the other side of the water cylinder, but, then of course I can still see the other side of the water when it is below the water surface, because that's what the first refraction ray will be. I then thought, well maybe I can add a black cylinder but then that will just make the refraction rays stop sooner and the resulting image will be darker.

So my questions will be:

- Is there a way to limit the distance of the refraction rays?
- If not, is there a way to output a refraction VEX variable based on the depth of the refracted ray? So that I can get an image plane that outputs only the furthest or closest refracted surface so that I can mask those.

I am using the glass shader preset from the material library, so nothing custom other than the lens shader, which is a modified reference to Paul's guide on custom lens shaders [www.sidefx.com] using VEX

So basically by now, what I need would be a render like the one with the Far Clip at 3.5 but without the refracted water from the other side.

*The viewport screenshot is a reference of how the water mesh looks like

Hellow Wizards!

I am working on a FLIP simulation that in all seems a bit too long to simulate.
The good thing about it is that the motion has some "rest" moments.
So my idea is that these rest moments act as "blending bridges" between them in case there are retakes on any of the stages. That way I can only resim the retake part and not the whole sequence.

For example:

Tank Filling Up -> Water Comes To Rest -> Water Motion #1 -> Water Comes To Rest -> Water Motion #2

What I would like to achieve is a way to have for instance, the "Tank Filling Up" motion to blend towards one frame of Water Comes To Rest, which will be used as initial data for the other two Water Motion clips.

I just started to look into a solution like this, but would be great to have some professional advice on how to achieve it.

Thanks a lot!

Hey Mark!
Sorry for not specifying that, it is for Mantra!
Now that you mention, I may start looking into porting my lens shader into Karma if the time allows.