Wireframes out of Maya????

[ACFred]

Look in the manual.....

muahahaha......

[studiomiguel]

:annoyed:

[studiomiguel]

So am I really restricted to rendering out pathetic little screen grabs? What happend to Maya's superiority complex? This program can do ANYTHING..... can't it?

:bounce:

8-)

[SheepFactory]

get the wireframe shader from highend3d , it'll do what you need.

and look in the manual , its a fun read.

[studiomiguel]

That's what I needed foxman! Thanks....
and I have read the manual
and it isn't a fun read....
dizzying is a more appropriate definition....

thanks

:beer:

[MCronin]

You can also use the hardware renderer to render out wireframes. Look in the manual.:thumbsup:

window->Rendering Editors->Hardware Render Buffer

[MikeRhone]

But the F1 button is SOO far away. ;)

But seriously, that highend wirframe shader is GREAT. Do some tweaks and throw on a slick shading network, and its millions of tiumes better than the hardware render. If its a complex model be prepared to se it chug though.


Mike R

[-wT-]

Originally posted by Rhonedog
But the F1 button is SOO far away. ;)

But seriously, that highend wirframe shader is GREAT. Do some tweaks and throw on a slick shading network, and its millions of tiumes better than the hardware render. If its a complex model be prepared to se it chug though.


Mike R

It's great eh? Ok, well then tell me how do you render quads with it?

Oh? You can't get a perfect rendering of quads? Well then it's not great, is it? :)

[kheemo]

if you had unwrap your mesh..go in the uveditor... take a uvsnapshot ... then put the image it gave you on a shader map it in transparency... quite long procces but result are great

[Jhonus]

Originally posted by -wT-
It's great eh? Ok, well then tell me how do you render quads with it?

Oh? You can't get a perfect rendering of quads? Well then it's not great, is it? :)

It renders quads ok.

[-wT-]

Uhm, no it doesn't.

It renders quads by deleting the longest edge of a triangle, as Maya doesn't give the necessary information when rendering. And that delete trick doesn't work when you've done a slightly more complicated model than those primitives ;)

I'll see if I have that one rendering I made...

[-wT-]

Ok here's the image: badwire.gif (http://device.dyndns.org/wt/badwire.gif)

You can clearly see how messy my modeling looks like, but it's just the wrong edges being deleted, and there's even some triangles left there completely.

The trick for using two objects to cull the backfaces in HW seemed just ingenious... but ofcourse my GFX card (GF2, the guy who wrote the tut has GF3) has some problems with deciding which object is infront, so I get bad artifacts :hmm:

[Jhonus]

i see. i havent had those problems b4, although i've only used it on simple models.

cheers
:beer:

[wedge]

kheemo: that doesn't work because you get overlap... for example, if you have a model with modeled nasal passages, the polys for the passages overlap the nose, so the wireframe for the nasal passage is projected onto the nose.... not good :sad:

[kheemo]

wgeddes : yeah true ... its give the transparent felling.. you can see the backside of the mesh in wireframe also I agreed that it can be messy in some areas,, oh well it a different way to do it maybe it can be usefull to somethings :shrug:

[studiomiguel]

I never could find the wireframe shader on Highend3d as was suggested. I found stone lattice which wasn't really a latice at all.
Fortunately my model was quite simple and I was able to create an orthographic wireframe in illustrator and then uv wrap that mug so that I got a nice map for my transparency.
So I got my wireframe.... Maya should really have an option to just crank that sucker out though. What a shame!:shame:

[artifish]

hi, we were discussing the problem of wireframe rendering in maya some time ago over on the highend3d mailing list.

chris kniffen kindly compiled the result containing all the relevant links and a technique he came up with into a nice tutorial. check it out!

http://www.kniffen.ca/index.php?target=tutorials/wire/wireTut.php

cheers, carsten

[Kabab]

Why don't just map a grid shader to the transparancey node and invert the black and white.

[wedge]

because that won't be the wireframe... it will be a grid in the shape of your model.

[studiomiguel]

yeah, I thought of this one too. But it looked 'fake'?? I don't really know how to describe it. My cheat (using illstrator art to mimic the irregularities of isoparms in placement) looked pretty good. The problem with that is that you'd never be able to use it on a complex object.

[Kabab]

I'll post a pic of my car with that shader tomorrow true it might look fake but isn't all 3d fake :)

I think it really depends on what you want for some effects its fine.

[studiomiguel]

Thanks for the link Artifish. I tried the method discussed and it works great. Unfortunately playblast is unable to generate an image larger than the display size, which screws up the need for a high rez (print rez) render. I'm going to give some of the other methods a shot to see what I get.

[Nitro]

"I never could find the wireframe shader on Highend3d as was suggested."

Its a plugin called wireData30_nt
It Work great.... :thumbsup:

[wedge]

Kabab: The point is you want a wireframe of your model.... so you can show the model itself.... having a grid mapped to the model does absolutely nothing to achieve this effect. so even if it looks "cool" it is NOT a wireframe render.

[-wT-]

http://www.geocities.com/jozvex/tutorials/wireframe.html

This tutorial would give you the best result, but ofcourse atleast my GFX card doesn't like the hack :sad:

Oh well, in case someone missed that.

[tophski]

yeah, Jared's tutorial is a great way to wireframe render stills through the hardware render buffer, but if you were to do it on a highres deforming animated mesh/nurbs surface/subd/whatevah, you'd have to watch for clashing surfaces between the outside and inside models, plus you'd have 2x the deforming models with animation and what-not bogging down your system. Btw, he did post a solution for the flicker problem with certain graphics cards that you can read here:

http://www.geocities.com/jozvex/tutorials/wireframe.html#update

The playblast version that I described on my site is very damn fast to render out, very easy to apply, and is true wireframe of your models, so what you see is what you get. For best results, render at a larger size and scale the images down with a photoshop action so you can get antialiasing through bilinear filtering.
(thanks for the plug btw Carsten :wavey: )

c.

[-wT-]

Yeah, Jared's solution wouldn't be the best for animations, but many of us would be using it for just a still wireframes too.

Oh and I was the one who reported that flicker ;)
Though that solution isn't 100% perfect either, too bad.

But I must try out that playblast trick, is it good for stills?

[tophski]

sure,
playblast just screencaptures the length of the time slider, so set your time slider to 1 or 2 frames. ;)
There is a little bit of a resolution cap on it though. The scale seems to be limited by screen resolution, understandably. At 1600x1200, I'm able to playblast a max res of 1156x908 (.avi) and 1156x911 (.IFF). At 1900x1440 I'm able to playblast at 1476x1148 (.avi) and 1476x1151 (.IFF), and at 2048x1536, I'm able to playblast at 1604x1244 (.avi) and 1604x1247 (.IFF). Thats on a P4 1.5ghz, Geforce2 Ultra.

c.

[wedge]

if you playblast from render globals, doesn't it just take the resolution of your globals?

[tophski]

yeah it does, I was just saying that if you wanted to render at a larger scale and resize that to a smaller resolution in Photoshop, that there are limits to how large you're able to render, regardless of what resolution you have set in your render globals.
...at least from the tests I did that I mentioned earlier. :)

c.

[dmcgrath]

What about copying your UV map into Photoshop and then coloring it and using it as a texture over your character?
I haven't tried it yet, but In theory it could work quite well. Even if you have deformation going on in motion, it should work well that way, wouldn't it?

[tophski]

Yep, I mentioned that at the start of my example page. Here's the quote from it:
"As discussed on the highend3d maya mail server, there is a few different ways to render out your model or animations into wireframe. A nice tutorial by Jared Martin was posted using the hardware render buffer by duplicating the model and severing the connection to the shader, therefore forcing the model to be rendered in wireframe, which can be found here (http://www.geocities.com/jozvex/tutorials/wireframe.html). There is also Dirk Bialluch's createWire.mel (http://www.lightstorm3d.com/tools/freetools/html/createWire.html) script, which creates actual geometry in place of the wires, and can then be software rendered with raytracing and shadows. There is also Martin Leguizamon's wireData plugin (http://www.geocities.com/provide3d/), which does a great job rendering wireframes. There's also a technique of using the UV snapshot function to create a "wire" texture map with alpha channel, which can then be mapped onto your model. I came up with a very simple cheat, which works very well and is also quite quick, through the use of playblast rendering. "
The example on my page is just that, an example. I never said it was the 'only' way to do it, just one way to do it.

c.

[dmcgrath]

Thanks man, I didnt see if somone had mentioned it earlier, I was just talking off the top of my head. I know very little about Maya T&R still, I figured I'd ask to see if someone would shout back.

BTW, Chris, I think I know you, did you work with Dave P?


-dan

[tophski]

Yes I did at H2O and at SecretLevel.
Where would I know you from?
(this is getting OT, feel free to email me privately).

c.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.