Messiah 2.4 has landed!

[Parsec3d]

From the Intaller:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New edit sphere:
- Has options for customizable line thickness, and shaded sphere area.
- Can grab anywhere on the lines or rings. Responds to the closest channel line, for faster grabbing.
- Option to rotate based on mouse direction relative to the world orientation.
- Option to set rotation limits for a drag while holding the shift key.
- Option to highlight the potential channel that will be selected, on mouse over.


Materials:
- Easy and powerful copy, paste, undo and Replace between materials, and still have all the surfaces that reference it intact.

Render:
- Added saving of more buffers: ObjectID, Shadow, Normals etc, for use in compositing.
- Diffuse and specular rendering changes its look based on the light size.
- New translucency settings and improvements as well as translucency from shadow mapped spot lights.
- Enhanced AA with super bright objects above 1.0.
- Higher quality soft shadow settings through reflections.
- New Fog, "Speed Hazer" plugin.

Interface:
- Color picker can switch between floating point color (0.0->1.0) or 8 bit (0->255) and now is the default for setting color in the material's interface.
- Added a frame slider button with current frame indicator, for easier grabbing to scrub.
- HDRI in texture map now has a popup choice between "Reflection map" and "Image light", and automatically
- defaults to "Image Light", if the light probe map type is chosen.
- Menus are now double buffered to eliminate flicker when drawing on some graphics cards.

Particles:
- New options for generating particles.
- New options for controlling particles with expressions and plugins.
- New vortex plugin that shows custom forces, modification of particle velocities and directions.
- New particle render shader for fast volume smoke and dust effects.

File Formats:
- Support of saving and loading .mdd files through SaveMorphSequence and DMorph respectively.
- Load and saving of 48 and 64bit tiff files (16bits per channel).

Fixes:
- When creating a number of objects in file->add_items they now will be numbered correctly when creating multiple items at once.
- Processing flag now saves/loads properly for tracks in compose
- The tooltip windows in the script palette now draw properly.
- Fixed a problem when loading non-LWO objects as clusters. This should also fix any other issues people were having with non LWO objects.


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Yay! lots of Stuf

[warpy]

what about the autorig or whatever they call it, was it included in this release ?

[svintaj]

No, no Autorig and no Develop in 2.4, so this can't be the final release.

/ Svante

[Layer01]

No, no Autorig and no Develop in 2.4, so this can't be the final release.

/ Svante

i agree. while its awesome to see change (and many things have changed for the better) this release has its share of bugs...and i'd think of it as a rather stable public beta. so dont assume that this is the end of your woes. it may be, but its no where near perfect...but its getting there, so when you run into a bug dont start screaming..report it and hopfully we can all work together to make it better :)

but it is cool :thumbsup:

[Panikos]

I wonder why there was no official word for this in the mailing list or here ?

[aforetaste]

Hmmm...
Is it me?
I don't see it on the download page of projectmessiah.com
[edit]
AHHHH... had to hit refresh.

[themick_g]

No, no Autorig and no Develop in 2.4, so this can't be the final release.

/ Svante

...once I bought Messiah BECAUSE of autorig, in their movies all worked fine. then
after testing a bit I realized it does not work....well, THANK YOU ...now I work with softimage XSI , there a brilliant rigging solutions and autorigs,and everything works fine....messiah went to my cupboard as a bad memory.....
dont want to talk bad about your software guys, I saw a lot of nice work done with it, but it was so dissapointing...

[MarkInTx]

...once I bought Messiah BECAUSE of autorig, in their movies all worked fine. then
after testing a bit I realized it does not work....

themick: Huh? Did Messiah used to have auto-rig? I was unaware of that... As for XSI, if it works for you, that's great. I have heard good things about it. I have also heard bad things about it. I think there is no perfect solution out there... I'm just a noob, so what do I know? Yet, somehow, I think there is more to animation software than auto-rig... ::: shrugs :::

Panikos: I think there was no official word yet, because it is not yet the official release. No documentation yet, and no examples. There is a note that they decided to make it available now, rather than make everyone wait... I'm guessing there will be a broadcast to the mailing list when the release is "offcial."

Everyone: Is auto-rig supposed to be in 2.4? Does anyone know what the project charter is for the 2.4 feature list? (I'm guessing PMG wouldn't make such a thing public... but you never know...)

[Wegg]

OOoooo. . . 2.4

I love these new Edit Sphere tweaks.

10/10 for "Option to rotate based on mouse direction relative to the world orientation."

Very cool. Much more intuitive for me.

5/10 for the "Option to set rotation limits for a drag while holding the shift key."

It works but. . . I guess I don't get why you would need it. I would love to be able to toggle a "degree snap" instead. Where if you were to hold the shift key down and click-drag it would pop to the degree increments you define.

10/10 for the "Option to Highlight the potential channel" VERY cool.

I haven't gotten to the other stuff yet.

One thing I DON'T like very much is that whopping great big yellow marker for the "where your at in the timeline" Holly BIG batman. Overkill IMO. I would have liked a slightly bigger triangle with the current frame on it. This big 20 pixel bar just eats into real-estate. :-(

[Julez4001]

Its looks and feel "unfoffical", so I guess that makes it un-official.:scream:

As for the AutoRig, Messiah point.x revs are always categorically specific.
This seems just a Render specific update witha few UI updates for sprinkles.

Hey its an unofficial official messiah update.

[Wegg]

If its on their website. . . and we are all using it. . . and it works with our dongles. . . why would you call it "unfoffical" (Unofficial)?

Minus a few docs that are still being finished up I'd call this an "official" release. Wouldn't you?

[Panikos]

I noticed a significant increase in speed of GUI, very happy about this.
I havent checked yet the OpenGL performance :)

[MarkInTx]

As for the AutoRig, Messiah point.x revs are always categorically specific.
This seems just a Render specific update witha few UI updates for sprinkles.


Well, I don't know how they do things at PMG. I'm a PM for a totally different kind of software, but... I can say that we would never go live with a version that had features unfinished or disabled. And, since they didn't call this a Beta (more like a pre-GA release) I would say that it is wishful thinking to assume Auto-Rig is going to make the feature cut.

This will be it, I think. The Render and GUI improvements.

Still, nice to see updates.

I've had Messiah for 2 weeks, and already an update!

Wooo Whoooo! Who says PMG is slow on updates? 2 weeks? Are you kidding me? :thumbsup:

[jbecana]

I was expecting Fred announcing the update in the mailing list as well. I just downloaded it this morning. Where are the new options for the Edit Sphere? Can't find them.

[DMack]

The yellow marker has got bigger?!?! Woohoo! That makes my day! I'll be downloading it asap!

[ThomasHelzle]

No Develop? Outch...

I did some tests with AoN:Studio (http://www.screendream.de/AoN_studio.htm) , everything works as expected but sometimes the lighting of the example scenes changed a bit because of the lights now having an actual size (see the 2.4 readme).

The finished Chainmail tutorial needs the projection of the Weave-texture set from Front-Projection to UV-Map since they have changed the order of projections in the dropdown. But at least there is no more crashing if you front-project a procedural without using a dummy image in the image node to give it a size to chew on.

If anyone finds some problems with AoN:studio other than that, please let me know.

Cheers!

[AAAron]

Thomas I'm super curious on the >easy glass shader< of yours. Can´t you give it a thought about releasing it separately, since I guess you got it finished and it doesen´t require you to write the whole manual for TLH Pro.

[ThomasHelzle]

Hi Aaaron,

sorry, but no. :sad:

When I find time to code at all, I am working on XSI shaders.
I'm a coder by need more than by profession and I still can't use messiah for my own work, so I had to decide at one point to no longer invest time in it about a year ago, other than supporting what's already there (AoN:Studio) as good as I possibly can.

So I currently neither plan feature updates on AoN:Studio other than bug fixes (but still nobody has reported a bug for 1.5 years now :shrug: :) ) nor releasing TLHPro in parts or in total.

But that shader doesn't do anything too special, other than sparing you the effort of creating the inner and outer surfaces physically.

I apologise for any inconvenience that decission may cause you :bowdown:

Cheers, :wavey:

[AAAron]

Have to do it the old way then ;), those old threads of about glass and diamonds been of great help.

[Gitch]

PMG has not landed it is no longer available on there website for download..

[Julez4001]

Taron said they will update a bug in 2.4

I guess they are doing it now and we will have to re download.

[Layer01]

weird. its in on the website here. i'm guessing its still the same as it has no "a" or "b" type thing after it?

[Gitch]

They just got it backup again in there download section marked the 19th..

[T4D]

SO far it's a nice update, free makes it even better :buttrock:
Seems afew want a autorigger in messiah
they maybe one coming From Me,. abit busy at the moment but it's being worked on ;)

Would like to see a official word from PmG on this 2.4 release
and would like info on Develop.. will there be a 2.5 in afew weeks..Months ?

[colour]

Hi Peter

Thats good news. If your messiah auto-rigger makes it anywhere as simple as your lightwave one does. I'll be one of the first in the queue and then I'll actually start trying messiah out for CA. I can painstakingly plough through the rigging of a character, but hey, thats not how I want to be spending my days, and if there's an auto-rigger to do it nicely for me, all the better!

Any ETA?
Can't wait.

[T4D]

At the moment I got a system for my own rigging needs working in Messiah right now

But just like the Lightwave version It will take some time ( My work load needs to lighten )
and get it where I would be happy others using it..

But it's nice to hear people want one, I better get a move on :)

[Julez4001]

Need any beta testers ..would gladly give it it a go.

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