Imported Surface Vs New material

[ThomasHelzle]

OK forget it...

[rush123]

Thomas,

Can I suggest you temper some of your responses! Though Julez is off-mark, and it's very frustrating for you. Perhaps you could publish a taster of your AoN (shader) manual to illuminate us all.

Ray

[Julez4001]

Look Thomas... I think ppl like u and Taron and PMG sometimes (not all the time) forget that ppl are not al programmers so what may come easy to you just doesn't mean its clear as a bell for the rest of us. I only aded that tidbit because it doesn't jumoped off at u and of the skinshading that ppl might want to consider to use if they bring their character and textures directly from Lightwave (haven't tested other apps). They may be a whole entire league of maya/ cd4 /max users that can translate node shading easily but i am from lw and the reason there is not a barrel of images because ppl haven't gave the whole shading gambit a go or haven't figured it out.


heck even chikega was stumped (feed up take whatever) on translucent/sss until we pal around and we got things going and bouncing ideas off each other.

"Julez, I don't know why you insist on throwing out your often uninformed blurbs as "Tips and Tricks" onto maybe new users who may really sit down and do what you say just to find themselfes confronted with completely useless "bells and whistles" as you put it.
What exactly are you doing whith them? Can you show me where it helps your renderings having "xamount" or some of the others available?
I really look forward to seeing some cool renderings from you!"

When I am comfortable with shading nodes ..I'll crank out a few.
Its not my forte' -- I AM LEARNING!

Not really a tip but a headsup!

[ThomasHelzle]

Sorry Julez, I'm just an asshole sometimes.

[Julez4001]

Its okay I guess we can all get upset sometime but the forum is just not the place to do it...just shoot me a email.

[EvilGnome]

The last thing we want to start doing is excluding people from asking questions that have glaringly obvious answers.... this is after all, a forum!:)


Heck, it'd mean lurkers like me would learn nothing.(because we're too frightened to ask ourselves)
So keep those sometimes "obvious" statements coming. We're all learning and at different levels.

As someone who sees a day coming when I'll be returning to do some Messiah animation after a long hiatus(and thus sitting in front of the computer saying "huh?" alot) this forum will be a valuable reference, both for the simple and highly technical tips.

Matt

PS: and now after chipping into a conversation that had nothing to do with me and thus alienating myself from the Messiah community, I'll shut up.

[Tombed]

Ha ha! ...............lurks off

[ThomasHelzle]

My problem had not so much to do with asking questions, but with reporting something as a "Tip" so it sounded like a fact that was just wrong. Leading people into false directions in a software that in itself is often misleading iterates confusion to new levels.

Given that the "Custom Shading" basis node shows an interface that has nothing to do with what it does and where 80% of the controls have no function at all is one of the baddest parts of messiahs otherwise mostly cool interface. The same is true for scripted shaders which show the same "default" interface without _any_ function.
Drives people crazy.
Even no interface would be better.
The old "Full shading" node offers not so much "bells and whistles" but brain, energy and fun killers since the additional inputs are mostly functionless.

Some of the above mentioned stuff is there for such a long time and makes me angry everytime another newbie has to ask the same question again and again after investing whatever amount of time in trying to find out how it works. So my real anger is directed towards pmG.
Writing an adequate interface for something like the "Custom Shading" should take someone with as much experience as the pmG guys about 15 minutes including testing. It would take myself maybe 30 minutes. It takes users hours, days or weeks of wasted time to work with the current stuff.

The homepage states: "Massively Enhanced Render API - Now you have even more control when you write shaders and shaderscripts!"
While it is true for C/C++ shaders, given the fact that shaderscripts have _no_ interface and do not work with multithreading you will no longer wonder why there aren't many of them...

There will be a lot more work needed on the user interface/workflow/interaction side of the renderer before we will see those tons of cool renderings coming instead of one in a month.

(My shaders or docs can't change that much BTW.)

On the "asking questions" side, just shoot :-)
But one can feel most of the time if someone is just throwing something out or if he/she is really working on something and trying to find a solution. The latter makes you ask much better questions and is much more fun to answer (if possible).

Am I "negative" again? If pointing out problems is "negative" - yes...
I'm all tears :cry:

P.S. and please pmG, finally remove the "quadrupeds" from the homepage. This is called "false advertising".
Hm... "negative" again? I am soooo sorry - I fear I will never learn how to behave :banghead:

:p

Crawling back to my cave...

[Julez4001]

What i have been able to understand in the shader nodes sectiom is from about 3-6 hours of study a week that I give myself to wrap my head around, mind you I am working on long and overdue CG short, doing "home stuff" with new house and spending time with my wife outside of 40+ workweek.

Gary (chikega) is working on a new personal non-cg related project so we don't get together as often..things usually speed up when we do. The information I posted here was out of frustration that I finally figured out that Taron shader node display on his scarecrow was in part a renamed basicshader or custom shadeflow that was probably created by a new material rather than my workflow of importing a lwo object. I just wanted give a headsup.

When I learned the animation tools and set up a quick workflow wiht messiah, it took a tenth of the time that its taking me just retain some type of system of doing anything with the renderer. because whatever "flow" I come up with usually gets broken by a newfound problem.

Like if you add a gradient to the transluenct or surface thickness of the base basic shader, its gonna be 9 time out of ten ...crash city. I make a note of that and don't go there anymore. . But if anyone knew of that problem I sure wish they would let someone know. Now I know this type of question/discussion asking pretty much ruin the messiah render thread and Wegg had to set up the messiah "gallery". I don't want to be the badguy thats for sure but this battle is going hard and slow(er).



Anyway this is what i trying to go for with skinshading and all those functionless part of the shader. http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=145071&page=1&pp=15
great thread on skinsahding.....


me I am trying to duplicate Stalberg tutorial on skin shading.
Just seem like i haveo controlof mixing two surfaces into one.
aka color gradients blending into a texturemap.....

http://www.flarenova.com/skinshader1.jpg

[EvilGnome]

Dont worry Thomas, I'll make sure I do plenty of searches and reading on the forum* before asking my stupid questions!:)

*so I can rephrase my stupid question so it doesn't sound like someone elses stupid question.

In all seriousness the discussions here excellent, especially considering that Messiah users are fewer and further between.

Matt

[ThomasHelzle]

Julez: That looks cool so far. I think that skin thread is absolutely fantastic and should help a lot with getting some nice surfaces. Stahlberg is one of those guys who really know their stuff but are still very open and improving every day.
Would be interesting what kind of shading algorithm messiah is using internally - those other 3D apps seem to have plenty of options there. Maybe "Matte" can be called "Blinn" or "Phong" (or whatever it is using) in later versions.

Edit: I just looked again at your screenshot - is it by intent that the two nodes you have plugged into your color input of the basis node have their modes at "="? Only the lower one will be used in that case, if you don't have the oppacity below 1.0 (can't see that in the image). To merge them together you can either use one of the other modes "+", "*" etc. or use a merger node or use one of them as the input to the other...
Sorry, I don't understand your last question above the screenshot. What are you saying?

Matt: You're welcome :bowdown:

[Julez4001]

yeah I tried "+" operators all ready and the don't work or at least not functioning like I though they would. The combination of one being "+" and other "=" just creates a shader that overblows the light and really overriding the specularity.


Taron has created a close look of Stalberg rim like shade tone. see the blue white rim light changes to purplish..sorta like the green guy actually has red blood inside of him. Course there is no texture map on him just base shader and i can get that...just want texture included and control the blending with them.


http://pixologic.com/zbrush/interviews/images/baysal_purdy-t.jpg


http://www.ona1r.com/jason/skinlight.gif

http://www.androidblues.com/mdtest16.jpg

Not the red shifting of her face on the edges and inside of the neck borders.
This not part of the texturemap but part of a "cartoon tone" shader mixing with the texturemap and translucency.


http://www.androidblues.com/mdtest17sss.jpg

[ThomasHelzle]

"+" blowing things out is the expected behaviour. Since the colors of the two layers are added together, the result will get bright. RGB(0.5, 0.4, 0.3) + RGB(1.0, 1.0, 1.0) will give you as a result RGB(1.5, 1.4, 1.3) which is way over white. If you combine two layers in AfterEffects with additive, you get exactly the same.
Those modes are really that simple. "*" will multiply each of the three numbers that make up one color with the corresponding number of the second color etc..

If you want good results from "+", you will need to lower the brightness of the two nodes plugged in there so that the result will look correct.
The current merger node and those modes in messiah are very primitive, maybe we will see something like in Fusion or other node based systems at a later point in time. Until then, my shader helpers can make it easier for you (at least I hope so). If you use a scale node for instance and set it to 0.5, your colors will become half as bright when going through it, so combining them with "+" will work better.
http://www.screen-dream.de/plugins.htm
The funny thing is, that I just sit here and write the docs for my shaders explaining exactly that all those ins and outs and colors and whatever are just being numbers. Forget everything about "Colors" or "Additive", it is only 0.5 + 0.5 in the end. So you can treat this stuff like every number and just numberchrunch it away.

What you can also try (maybe you did already) is using a gradient that uses light incidence but isn't fully opaque. Just give every color dot in the gradient an alpha value of how much you want to see it.

Looking at the image from Taron, I would rather think the backlight is colored reddish? I don't see much advanced stuff in there. A bit translucency maybe...? But skin was never a major interest for me, so others may have better ideas...

[WesComan]

Julez: Have you looked into the Basic Shader? There's a whole load of options for blending, messing around with the light/surface gradients and depths...


Here's a quickie I posted a while ago...
http://www.cgtalk.com/showpost.php?p=1447536&postcount=103

Hope this helps :)

[Julez4001]

Hey Wes, played with your shader.
Its nice but its not allowing one to blend two surface closers. The radiance just washes every thing out, you really don;'t have any control of the textures blend with each other or interact in a "photoshop" way.

[Julez4001]

Gonna take a break from shader flow.
Still haven't be able to blend gradient into a texture map yet (well without exploding the specularity or lumiousity of the surface which are all at their standard setting).
Its just getting a little two clumbersome for something as simple to do in photoshop, lw or xsi.
I'll wait on Tarons new sss tool maybe that'll help.

[WesComan]

Here's a simple blend between a gradient and a texture map...


http://img38.exs.cx/img38/4632/GradTexBlend.th.jpg (http://img38.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img38&image=GradTexBlend.jpg)

On the TextureMap node I've set the Shader->Mix to 0.5 (ringed in red) and added a gradient (set as a camera fresnel) into the opacity. Is this going in the direction you're after?

[Julez4001]

Thanks Wes, I was always able to get the blends from textures and gradients with simple spheres and boxes. Its in my character work that seem not to adhere to what i want. I dunno if its the models or the material sets or what. I just can't seem to get the blends the way i get them in maya oe lightwave. Radiance seem the way to go to get the look but the diffusion keeps getting sot of cancel out and every thing jumps n the luminosity channel (evenly I might add).

Looking forward to taron's new SSS feature he mention in the messiah render thread.

[Julez4001]

Notice how the texturemap (image of some flesh) gets "washed" out.
I really don't like that. Once you add anything t the color channel, it become less.
In Lightwave, it doesn't do this.

Also it would be great the redness to start lighten the shadow side.
And have a SSS look but as soon as you play with radiance (which I've come to understand supposely controls SSS) the object lites up completely like a lamp ignoring any diffusion and shadow.

http://www.flarenova.com/translu01.jpg

[lmilton]

I fail to see the problem here. Looking at the series of gradients you have going there, especially the specular color, I don't see the problem.

Also, it appears that you don't understand the Radiance input. Radiance is only for shaders that will replace messiah internal shading. This means that the standard diffuse, specular, etc. setting are ignored. Currently, the only shader that provides its own radiance is BasicShader. If you're having a good deal of trouble understanding Radiance, never connect anything to Radiance and just use the standard shading params. At least until we are able to provide examples that you can understand.

-lyle

[Julez4001]

I think I can control lighting, right now its just diffusion that I can get to act right.
If radiance knocks diffusion out, what do I use to compensate for its loss?
I just to create alternate gradient to lower the "blown out" parts..

[Julez4001]

This is what i am going for

http://www.androidblues.com/skinideal.jpg

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