spinners opened this issue on Mar 10, 2006 ยท 16 posts
Lacathedral posted Fri, 10 March 2006 at 10:22 PM
I keep an extra folder of shaders in my documents folder so I can copy them in and out to my desktop real fast. I've toyed with the idea of making a free online library for upload and download, but there's two problems with that. One is coming up with a good sorting or naming convention.. For instance, if i made a website where you could upload ten of your favorite shaders and browse and download 1 thousand other free ones donated by community folks, there would no doubt be 100 of them called "wood". lol okay, so 5 thousand users might be trying to upload "wood" shader and getting rejected because overwrite is turned off... See what I mean? Plus people would be renaming to weird stuff all the time so they wouldn't get blocked and then you'd have a nightmare trying to find what you want. Plus, taking any security concerns out of it, there's no good way to export a shader with a preview of it unless you make your own thumbnail, which isn't hard, but not time efficient either when you want to upload and download stuff quick. I did ask for a shader export button for c6 so the community could have a very simple way to share shaders. I think in theory it's a good idea, but who knows if its really practical. Lastly, you can buy shader cd's and they are nice usually, but Carrara is different than poser and doesn't have or really "need" a content store like poser or daz do. Plug-ins are one thing, but shaders in my mind are a little iffy. I'd rather make a fair one than buy a great one, but that's just me.