Cool things no one knows about EIAS

#7

This should read “Adaptive” mode.

#8

Yes, the anti-aliasing setting is “Adaptive” vs. Oversample
But look at the Camera window while rendering… next to the antialiasing item it will say “Average”.

#9

You can do replacement animation, where a different model appears on each frame, through “group cycling”.

This requires creating a model for each frame of the sequence and importing them - in order - into Animator. All of the models are then Parented to the very first model in the list. The Parent model then has two tilde’s added to it’s name (i.e. ~~Model).

During rendering the Parent model never appears, instead, the first child is rendered on the first frame, the second for the second frame and so on.

#10

This is a great trick that also has GUI controls.
There is now a tab in a group’s info window to control child cycling.
This includes start and stop frames, and frame rate and “loop” controls.

(This trick reminds me of the secret $cloud$ shader from v2.7- anybody remember the specifics on these? Are they still active? (even though no longer neccesary).

#11

Sometimes you try all your might to grab the Bezier handle of a keyframe but can only get the translation arrows. Clic anywhere beside the point, the handles are still there but the translation arrows are out of the way. Do your thing…

#12

Hi, gentlemen

Last 2 days we’ve been busy with learning how EI scales a plug-in with chidren. Finally it’s clear , so let us story what we’ve learned, and, of course, sorry if we “rediscovered a bicyrcle” :slight_smile: At least it’s a new for us.

Ok, steps:

  • create a simplest cube with Ubershape (resolution = 1)
  • add MrBlobby to prj, set “vertex blobs” and link the Cube to it

Now you see 8 balls (for each cube’s corner). Let’s start experiments with “Inherit scale” = OFF for children.

  • save MrBlobby as a model, re-import it and try to scale. All goes fine, scale works in absolute standard and intuitive way. BTW: same results are with “Live plug-in” = OFF

  • try same scales with MrBlobby plug-in (Group Window). Ops! Absolute different results! We see our balls are enlarged/reduced correspondly, but distances between them remain the same.

We’ve learned how it works. If plug-in’s scale = 2 (for example), then EI passes to the plug-in the children data scaled to 0.5 (and vice versa, children are enlarged twice if scale = 0.5). A plug-in reads children and creates a geometry. EI scales the plug-in’s output. Final result: previously reduced/enlarged source data take their original places (cube’s corners in our test), but plug-ins results are scaled (balls)

Hmmm… interesting solution, but … suitable not for all plug-ins :hmm:

Ok, now set “Inherit scale” = ON for child groups. For our example it works as a “standard” scale. But it’s not so if a plug-in has 2 or more chidren, cause each child uses its local center to scale.

There are a lot of scales in EI :slight_smile:

#13

You can preview motion blur and DoF within Animator, no need to do a test render!

  1. Select the world view window
  2. Render > Preview Blur Window

Just make sure you have multi-frame set to more then one frame and that your preview is set to output to screen (thats the default anyway).

Ian

#14

This tip was given on the Postforum by Charles Berg (Cj)
It shows how you can reposition groups by dragging over the icon or make it a child by dragging over the title. Easier to show:
http://www.rdn.qc.ca/EIAS/Project_window_order.mov

#15

This tip was given by Halfworld on the Electricimage Forum.

#16

The project window has far more ways to be organised then some people realise. Have a look at the little icons at the top of the project window. Specially the first and the fifth give you a lot of options. Too many to sum up here, just explore them.
One of my favourites is to colour label the elements in a complex rig that will animate and switch to “view by label”. That way you don’t see the parts of the rig that you don’t animate and everything appears in a listed way which takes up much less screen space.

#17

grrr…need to figure out why this doesn’t work in OpenGL. And perhaps add full-window cross-hairs.

#18

I love this one, the most useful to me has to be ‘complexity’ which lists objects in order of polygon count. I use it often.

#19

Here’s another one.

You can render your animations backwards if need be, we’ve had to do this a few times but I keep forgetting it’s even an option, hopefully this will immortalise it in my mind :slight_smile:

In the render window > click timing > render: range of frames (drop down) > hit reverse.

!!
Ian

#20

Next up

You can colour cameras, I usually colour them so they match their colour label in the project window.

In general I use three labels for cameras: Possible viewpoints, Confirmed viewpoints, Render cameras (render cameras being free roaming cameras for diagnostic purposes viz. not animated or in a viewpoint position).

Take a look at the attachments,
Ian

#21

Good Tips Ian-

I always color code things with a red label that I want turned OFF at rendertime.
Use the “select by- label” option from the select menu, choosing the red color and click the visibility check on any group with a red label and ALL red labeled groups will be turned off.
I make a habit of checking this just before hitting “Go”.

I also often use the light blue label for glass objects to help control them in a similar way.

Should we open a new thread with workflow tips like these? (or maybe we have too many thread titles?)

I sure would like to learn about other people’s process and how they set up projects.

#22

This is one of those features that when you get into a habit of using helps you to make texture previews fast. We all know how time consuming getting that texture to look just the way we want it to well here’s how I hurry things up.

Under the “Snapshot” camera icon at the bottom of the “Camera View” window there is the option to define an area with a marquee that only renders the defined part of the “Camera View”. Used in conjunction with reduced or no antialiasing and low sampling levels for lights etc you can get previews to turn around realy quick.

Buggsy

#23

This tip was given by halfworld on how to get brighter highlights:

“If you’re highlights arn’t bright enough remember you can just add the Anisotropic shader, turn off the patterns and turn on the phong/blinn specular. You can set the brightness above 1 here whereas you can’t in the specular tab.”

Nice tip Ian.

#24

When working on very large projects there can be a noticeable time delay (with the spinning beachball making frequent appearances) as the project ‘refreshes’ after every mouse movement or click, as you work. This repeated delay can become quite intrusive even when simply selecting items in the project window, particularly when making multiple selections using the shift-click technique.

My suggestion is to make multiple selections in the project window by holding shift down and then repeatedly click-dragging a marquee over the item/items you want to select them (even if they are single seperated items). This selection behaviour seems to supress the software’s ‘refresh’ action until you release the shift button indicating the selection process is finished. This makes working on large projects a lot quicker.

Cheers
Gyro

#25

Some quick navigation hints for the orthographic viewports.

Click on the Magnifying glass icon and the view zooms out in discrete increments. Shift+Click on the Magnifying glass icon and the view zooms in.

Alt(or Opt)+Click on the Magnifying glass icon and the view zooms (In or Out) to encompase all items in the scene. Move the cursor over the viewport window and hold down the ‘F’ key. The cursor changes to a Magnifying glass. Click in the window and the view zooms to encompase all items in the scene. (Sort of a duplicate of the Alt click function).

Hold down the Alt key and the cursor changes to a Hand with Index finger extended. Click and drag a Marquee and the view zooms in to that specific area.

Select any item, hold down the ‘C’ key, and click in the viewport window. The view shifts to Center the selected item in the view. Hold down the ‘C’ key with Nothing selected and click in the viewport window. The view is Centered without zooming.

#26

Hi All.

I have done a few tests with small render files that took about 60 seconds to render straight out of EI. The scene has a simple sphere with raytraced sub surface scattering, 2 lights, global raytraced reflections and GI, rendered at half Hi def size (960 x 540). The machine configuration is Mac OS 10.4.10, 2 x 3Ghz Dual core Intel, 4GB RAM.

I found that with the local and 3 slaves (2 intances of rama on the main hard disk and 2 instances on an external drive) 4 frames rendered simultaneously in 60 Seconds, effectivly quartering the render times! So it seems that the dual processors and dual cores are all being utilised in this situation.

I have also loaded 4 instances of renderama slave onto an identical mac on the network and found that both machines running 8 frames of the animation completed all in 60 seconds.

This may be trivial to some but it is a great time saver for us, so hopefully it is useful to someone else and hopefully I have put it into terms that others can understand, like me!

Ash