MetaSL no longer developed by NVidia

[Daniel Brassard]

As seen on NVidia website:

We have archived the website because MetaSL will no longer be further developed at NVIDIA, but we continue to fully support the language for Autodesk in conjunction with 3dsMax. The engineering resources have been transitioned to the development of MDL, the Material Definition Language. MDL relies on Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Functions (BSDF), Emissive Distribution Functions (EDF), Volume Distribution Functions (VDF) and is used in our Iray rendering solution.

more info at http://www.nvidia-arc.com/index.php?id=1319

[Bullit]

Isn't HQV related with metaSL?

[Daniel Brassard]

Some part of it, quote from the User Guide...

Tries to approximate the rendered output as closely as possible. This is actually an OpenGL realtime mode that uses MetaSL blocks embedded in shader definitions to emulate the renderer's shaders in realtime.

I guess the HQV will have to be re-worked!

[luceric]

it hasn't been developed for a long time, but what's there is going to remain there and as is for a long time. you could say the same for much of mental ray!

[Maximus]

it hasn't been developed for a long time, but what's there is going to remain there and as is for a long time. you could say the same for much of mental ray!

I would rephrase it like this "it hasnt been developed for a long time, but what's there is going to be out of the market, unusuable, archaic"

[Daniel Brassard]

You were on your own anyway to learn MetaSL (no book, no tutorials, only the specification). Andy Kopra website was the only source of information and I am glad he put the first five chapters of his book there. Unfortunately even Andy Kopra book site has been removed.

Questions on the NVidia forum were slow to answer and mostly in the line of "Unfortunately we am unable to help with Softimage related questions since Softimage has no official MetaSL support". The implementation in Softimage was old already, missing simple things like "color" type and buggy. MetaSL implementation needed to be upgraded to specification 1.23 anyway as missing too many things.

Well, it's too bad. MetaSL is a simple language to learn and to create/experiment with shaders. I was getting pretty good at it too. Hopefully, I can transfer the knowledge to MDL when it become available.

Que Sera Sera!