Character animation system released

[azazel]

I assume it's for realtime use. Is there possibility to use it inside Maya with high poly models? With Mystique added that would be very atractive... I could make some battle scene :) . BTW, what happened to Mystique? Will it ever be released?

[Buckshag]

No, you won't be able to directly use it in Maya, only export data from Maya. Unless we make some plugin for Maya which allows characters to be updated fast inside Maya of course :) But I don't know if there is really a need for that? :)

Mystique, it's a spare-time project I do, but since I put all my money into the development of Liquid Motion, becuase it is a commercial project which will make some money hopefully I ran out of money after a while, so I really needed to focus all my efforts on LM, because Mystique will not make any money since it's a freeware project. So that's why Mystique currently is put on hold. Once I have the time to work on it again I promise to make something really cool for you Maya users :) I also build some photon mapping render plugin (not shown on the site) and compared it to MentalRay for Maya, and it was about 100 times faster and resulted in much higher quality than MentalRay, so that's a good thing to see already :) But that might have been a specific environment we tested in, maybe on other scenes it wouldn't be so fast compared to MentalRay, I don't know :) We'll see what will happen.

Do you have some ideas of plugins or programs or whatever which you guys might be very interested in? Something you still miss?

[azazel]

Sounds promising :thumbsup: Is there any chance to try this photon mapping render plugin or it will be part of Mystique? I'd very gladly test it's speed on my system ;)

I'm not a game developer, that's why I asked about using LM with Maya. Hope it'll sell well ;)

[Buckshag]

It's part of Mystique :) Mystique can have multiple render plugins. So you can choose with what to render. I have made several plugins, like a simple raytracer ala Maya standard renderer to global illumination like Brazil does to photonmaps only, like Finalrender I think does.
Yeah, I also hope LM will sell well, I am getting really good responds on it until now :) But when I posted a news item for Mystique I got so many mails the next day that I thought it was a bug in Outlook :)) Unfortunately I couldn't reply to all people who have sent me mail to ask for testing, I just couldn't keep it up. It's cool to know that there is so many interest for it, it really gives a big motivation boost :) But I'm sure now there are going to be a lot of render systems for Maya already? So will it still be useful? :)

[azazel]

There is:
- Mental Ray, even free, but sometimes slow and has some problems (mainly with connecting with Maya), no sds support,
- some renderman compliant renderers (via plugs like Liquid or RAT or Mayaman), some free,
- Virtualight via MVL plugin, still free and still some problems with connection.
- even PovRAY (yes, somebody wrote plugin connecting it to Maya)
- Probably there will be VRay for Maya, IMO one of the best for MAX, and very fast.
That's every known to me. All of them have two things in common: they are too slow ('cept VRay probably) and usually not enough user friendly. It'll be nice to have fast, easy to use, reliable renderer producing high quality images. Most of above renderers can give great quality images, but not so fast usually :annoyed: So I hope Mystique will be something to solve some problems:) . It will be useful - to directly answer your question ;)

[Buckshag]

Thanks for the info :)
So basically you need some GI system for maya which:
- is fully integrated inside the maya pipeline
- supports subdiv surfaces
- high quality results
- renders very fast

What about:
- network rendering support ala SETI style, so internet rendering
- rendering of particles? (i had a lot of requests for this)

I was working on the network rendering, I want to have Mystique screensavers, which will put your computer in 'slave' mode when you are doing nothing, and then help to cooperate in some render job someone has started. I think that can be pretty cool, just imagine having 1000 computers or more available to render :)
Will only help with bigger scenes though, else it's not really worth that the client download all scene and texture info from the server. But it can probably be made so that you will only need the polygon info and some basic material info. So that you do the texture lookups on the computer who started the render jobs, but use some calculated values which come from another machine.
Anyway, I see that I start to go way off topic again :rolleyes: So I better stop typing :D

Thanks again for the info, and let me know if you have any additional ideas or comments.

[azazel]

Network rendering and screensaver idea is great! Of course particle rendering would be nice, along with HDRI support ;).

Now I have every reason to be impatient :thumbsup:

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