How to render particles blobs (metaclay balls) with true reflection and refraction?
by Homam Bahnassi This is one of the hottest topics that was discussed a lot of times. The problem lies in that the current version of XSI (4.2) has no direct way to control refraction/reflection in the blob shader, and it is really ugly to have only simple transparency (ptype alpha) on the blobs without any refraction or reflection. Even if you try to enhance it with static blur, it will still not look acceptable for most SFX renders. One method that I use frequently (easy to setup and control) is to use the legacy particles blob shaders (volume and material) that were used in XSI prior version 3 (they are still in 4.2 for backwards compatibility). The use of these shaders enables us to add a lot of nifty effects to the blobs, including reflection/refraction/fractal bump/static blur along with a lot of shading models. However, on the other hand we lose the ability to build complex render trees, since these shaders don’t accept any input nodes. The use of these shaders might be a littl
