Hi,

After long hours of toil, I finally have a working version of a Maya
plugin which implements the single scattering model. I have attached
two sample screen shots, the plugin source, a compiled version
(SingleScatterFog.mll) in the source zip file, and the scene
(volume_test.mb) used to generate the sample screen shots also in
the source zip file.

To setup the plugin on a machine initially, you must of course load
the plugin into maya, but you also have to create an environment
variable called SINGLE_SCATTER_PATH and point it to the location of
the three csv tables in the zip file.

To use the plugin in a new scene, after following the setup
instructions just above this paragraph, you have to do the
following:

Create a Single Scatter Fog volume material.
Link the Single Scatter Fog node to the shading group for your
scene.
Set the Scattering Coef and color on the Single Scatter Fog node.
Create a Single Scatter Shader material.
Link the Single Scatter Shader node to the shading group for your
scene.
Link the Out Scattering Coef output on the Single Scatter Fog node
to the Scattering Coef input on the Single Scatter Shader node.

To make the shader material shiny, enable the shiny checkbox on the
Single Scatter Shader node. The only choice of Phong exponent is
20.


Known limitations:
-After running a render, when unloading the plugin, Maya generates a
fatal error. I have no idea what causes this, Maya gives no hints
and since it's only on unloading, I didn't spend much time on this.

-In renders, sometimes there's some randomly placed black dots. The
locations are random even if you render the same scene twice and I
can't see anything I'm doing wrong.

-As stated above, the phong exponent can only be 20.

-Of course, this only works with point lights.

-Only works on windows and you need Visual Studio.NET 2003 to
compile.


Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Matthew Schulkind
