BA Shaders in XSI 7, where to get started?

[Janne404]

I heard that BA (binaryalchemy) shaders are now part of XSI 7, but I couldn't find any documentation on XSI 7 help docs, is there documentation/getting started tutorials found somewhere? I have never used any of the BA shaders so I'm pretty clueless. BinaryAlchemys site wasn't that helpfull either.

[NNois]

for example "fractal scalar" and "cell scalar" are BA shaders

[ThE_JacO]

The volume and density shaders are now the ICE particle shaders, and cell and fractal are two of the procedurals.
The XSI manuals cover a lot of the ground that was covered by BA docs now in the section dedicated to those shaders (ICE particle shaders).

[Werner]

I just started to play with them, but found them to render very slow.
Maybe I need to dig deeper to understand why they don't render if your scene is small in scale, as well as the long render times. I did get some awesome results though.

[ThE_JacO]

There are parameters that are related to the scene size, the same parameters also affect greatly the render times.
In the look-up tab of the particle volume shader you can find the cell size (if set on auto) or the grid's subdivisions the volume is discretized into before rendering (diced into sub-volumes that are then interpolated and shaded, for the sake of simplicity).
The writing on those shaders' docs is actually pretty good.
Holger also posted a very good mail on the xsi mailing list about how the proceedings he uses to set a scene/rendering up, you can dig for it in the archives even if you're not subscribed.

[Werner]

Thanks ThE_JacO, That sounds great. I will go through the shader section in the docs tonight.

Looking at the sample scenes again, they render allot quicker, as well as better quality then my tests, so you speak true! Thanks again for the tip.

[Janne404]

Thanks ThE_JacO and NNois, that explains why there was no "BA shaders" mentioned anywhere in the docs. Just have to look more into ICE particle shaders then.