Probe ray API support

[Jpjapers]

For the wonderful guys over at richdirt :) Just putting it on here so it has a place on the corona forums.

[essentium]

That's all we need for the corona_RichDirt become true!

[Michał Morzy]

Dear Corona Developers,

That would be something that would help us all! I heard from many of my colleagues that the only thing that keeps them to try Corona in commission work is the lack of their favorite plugin. Please take that into consideration.

[maru]

The last message from our team to the plugin developer that I recall was that we cannot help before Corona v3 is released (this was because of multiple reasons - mainly technical). But of course if there is enough requests we will look at it again.
What interests me most is what exactly can be achieved by the Rich Dirt plugin, that cannot be done with Corona alone? I am not asking because I negate the usefulness of the plugin, or its feature set, but because I am simply not familiar with it. Could anyone share some examples with us?

[maru]

Ok, so here is what I have learnt so far:
-it has more advanced "edge detection" capabilities
-dry areas when something is concave
-works fine with thin geometry (it will not affect itself)
-creates longer streaks closer to the edges of the window sills

[romullus]

I haven't used richdirt once, but from what i saw, i think the most significant advantage, is the ease of use. With AO approach, you have to build complex shader tree, fiddle with exclusions, distances, directions, constantly switch between various maps and with richdirt you get automated result, almost one click solution. That is a huge advantage when working with huge scenes and tight deadlines.

[Jpjapers]

I haven't used richdirt once, but from what i saw, i think the most significant advantage, is the ease of use. With AO approach, you have to build complex shader tree, fiddle with exclusions, distances, directions, constantly switch between various maps and with richdirt you get automated result, almost one click solution. That is a huge advantage when working with huge scenes and tight deadlines.

The ability to mass add dirt is great.
However if the team was to develop a coronadirt material that a corona material could feed into then maybe things would change especially if it could be added as a render element to the entire scene at once HINTHINT

However as ive previously voiced this opinion, the complex shader trees needed to achieve good dirt with corona AO arent documented anywhere and the only way to learn right now is to visit your HQ Hence why ive mentioned a few times there should be a viable video tutorial alternative for the sessions you do with the guys who want to become tutors, for people who just want to learn.

But thats a whole different issue.

This would be a fantastic addition to corona if you did your own and a fantastic integration if richdirt was made compatible :)