shave & instance texturing

[AdamT]

If I remember correctly, you have to set the colors in the shave shader to black. I suggested they put that in the manual but I guess it didn't make it in.

[Brucie Rosch]

hmm, well I tried changing the colors to black... no good. Then I tried (in addition to black colors) turning the color brightness to 0%. No good.

Any other ideas? I'm going to have another (more painstaking) look at the autumn forest example file and see what I can see there.

thanks for the help Adam :)

[Brucie Rosch]

here's a funny thing (only I'm not laughing)... I just opened the autumn forest file and changed the hair count from 70 to 20 (faster render) and made the render window smaller. Then I rendered to the picture viewer and guess what? Bright white. There's no texture applied to the tree instance either.

What the heck??

Can you get this to work Adam? If so, I wonder if it's a Mac problem?

[Brucie Rosch]

update: If I give the tree instance a texture, it renders correctly, so it must be something I'm doing in setting up my hair object...

[Brucie Rosch]

ok, this is making me ill, so I'd appreciate any help that's out there.

In the autumn landscape file, if I give the tree the same material as the landscape, it renders fine. But, if I replace the tree instance with a simple cube (made editable or not), and give it the same material, the cube renders with a dayglo green color. I've tried reversing the normals and back again. No good.

Logic tells me that there is something about that tree object that is different from the cube object, in some way that matters to Shave. But how/what???

arghhh.

[Katachi]

Hi,

Shave does only use per vertex shading and if your cube only has a few points (i.e. default state) then it won´t be that detailed. Actually I found out that it is necessary to have the instance object at coordinates 0,0,0 to make it work correctly.

If you cannot make it work you can send me the scene and I´ll set it up for you.

Best
Samir

[Brucie Rosch]

thanks Samir... I'll try to hammer my way through it again. If I still have trouble I'll take you up on your (kind) offer. (BTW, I set up a hotmail email account to get around my previous over zealous ISP problems :) )

[Brucie Rosch]

Samir, I sent you a file earlier this morning... I'm still working on it. I got a reply from an email I sent to Joe Alter. He wrote back that he was looking at it now and: "Try rendering it as geometry (instead of the buffer)"

[Katachi]

Hi brucie,

ok 1.) there is no geomery rendering for shave in cinema 4D. This might be a MAYA only feature.

2.) The problem is only partly shave. It´s the cinema 4D shaders. Bhodinut shaders for example (try gradient i.e.) do work just fine for me but none of the c4d shaders do work.

3.) Just contact the Tech support next time, they should find out such things too... :)

4.) The instancing doesn´t seem work as good as I have it in mind...I wouldn´t use it for real work, just for background purposes where you do not need close-ups etc..

Best
Samir

[Brucie Rosch]

thanks for your efforts Samir.

I have to say that I'm really disappointed. I thought I'd be able to get my quills done using Shave.

It's not all that clear to me who is ultimately responsible for the quality of this plugin... it's Joe Alter's handiwork, ported to C4D by Maxon (? is this correct ?), with the manual written by Joe Alter (? Maxon sales told me to contact him regarding the fact that there are no printed Shave 2 manuals. I finally printed out the pages that were confusing me on my B&W laser printer -- a compromise)

Well thanks again...

edit: let me be clear that I think this is a great plugin (I'm very happy with the Teddy Bear I made). I'm just a little out of sorts about spending 6-8 hours for no reason.

[AdamT]

Sorry for you're hassle Brucie. I wish I could've been of more help, but I honestly can't remember off the top of my head how I got it to work, and I have a deadline so I don't have time to play around with it.

To answer some of your questions, Alter is the producer of the plugin (i.e., he gets most of the money) and he is ultimately responsible for the hair engine. Maxon is the distributor and is responsible for the Shave/C4D connection software. Maxon wrote the manual, but since it's ultimately Alter's product, he gets to set the price and decide what's included.

[Brucie Rosch]

Maxon is the distributor and is responsible for the Shave/C4D connection software. Maxon wrote the manual, but since it's ultimately Alter's product, he gets to set the price and decide what's included.

Well the good news, maybe, is that Maxon ought to be able to fix this problem (Dave O'Reilly aka obeardy found instancing problems too and reported to Maxon, as did I).

[flingster]

are we talking version 1 or 2.
cos i could never get instancing to work in v1...i always presumed it was me? are we now saying v2 has issues...cos it was one of the reasons i was thinking about upgrading..

:shrug:

[AdamT]

Originally posted by Brucie Rosch
Well the good news, maybe, is that Maxon ought to be able to fix this problem (Dave O'Reilly aka obeardy found instancing problems too and reported to Maxon, as did I).

O'Reilly's the guy who wrote the bridge plugin, so I guess he must have reported it to himself! :)

[Brucie Rosch]

O'Reilly's the guy who wrote the bridge plugin, so I guess he must have reported it to himself!
heh!

I also heard from Joe that he suspects it might actually be a Shave bug, so I sent word of this to Dave... (bad Brucie, BAD! for contacting Joe Alter on this rather than Maxon tech, but maybe it's all to the good if it really is a Shave bug)

@flingster this is Shave 2 we're talking about, so if it's only instancing you want to work... I dunno. But (though I haven't done much yet beyond beat my head against the wall over instancing) the new interface is nicer (ie. little icons instead of text buttons), and the renderings are supposed to be very very nice. There might be some improvements to combing also.

Once I get done with Mr. Hedgehog, I'm going to work on something with fur and report back with impressions.

[dfaris]

Did any of these problems get figured out? I have just started a project and was going to use shave and instance but it seems that the instance does not follow the hair guide is this true? If I use an oject as an instance in shave will it follow the hair guid or will it just grow straight? Right now it seems that its not following the hair guide.

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