ctrl_buffers

#701

I know francesca is going to explode when reading this now (forgive me), but that’s one thing that’s bothering me about her attitude: she almost never released any of her code. Unlike max from ctrl studio for example, who’s firing off brilliant snippets one after the other on lamrug. Or Puppet who has a huge code repository. Or Gonzalo who even built a whole open source translator.

Of course it’s her good right to retain her code. And I do greatly appreciate her effort anyway, and I’m thankful for every little glimpse by her. But I rather want to learn fishing on my own, instead of receiving the fishes by someone else. Dont get me wrong, I’d love to see her back and unbanned again.

About the docs: it’s not the duty of the docs to explain the latest buzz. If you’re into it, you should already know what’s hot and what’s not. Of course it’s good to have explanations about that stuff, and for example Master Zap is having really great effort on that. But you shouldnt start driving in a formula1 car either, do you? Start off with a little honda civic or whatever. I know it sounds rude for people starting off with all that rendering sorcery, sorry about that, but if you want that one-knob-doodle go check out maxwell, it’s great, or vray or finalRender, or turtle. I’m really tired of all that I-want-it-to-be-easier debates. Art and craft goes hand in hand.

#702

i can tell you spent a long time learning this and would feel very disappointed if the knowledge became un necessary via workflow improvement or better training material to allow regular users to access “advanced” features. thats your right but 99% of us wont shut up till they improve the situation… and thats our right :slight_smile: i think voicing opnions on forums like this can have a real effect on software development, thats why i bother…

as far as docs purpose not talking about practical every day workflow… ok… so call it something other than docs if you want to get into a semantic arguement. mental ray should come with TRAINING MATERIALS as well as reference docs, how about that? and by “should” i mean, if they want to make it easy for people to use. which again, i have serious doubts about :slight_smile: the typical MR power user seem to think user friendliness is a bad thing. you get that attitude with anything that is hard to learn among those who have mastered it. they get replaced by the next generation via market forces as its ineficcient to the capitolist machine to keep paying those experts when they could pay the programmers instead to make it easy for monkeys :slight_smile:

as far as “advanced” features not for beginners, and the craft that goes into art… i agree and disagree. most of the technologically advanced lighting is actually more intuitive to people who have spent time in the real world as its based closer to how light really behaves. so from that sense its much more user friendly then what might be less techncally advanced rendering. trying to do a good job simulating realistic lighting with just scanline rendering is FAR more of a craft than using any indirect illumination renderer to do it. so i think thats a weak defense for bad documents :slight_smile:

#703

By trying to learn mental ray you learn how a renderer in general works - that’s some huge amount of ‘portable’ information. Not sure what’s bad about that, and why the ‘capitolist machine’ (?) should quit liking people with a broad understanding of that. Hijack terminated.

#704

I, at one hand, also don’t want to contribute to hijacking this thread but on the other hand this is an interesting turn of the discussion that in my opinion deserves more and may be its own thread and an appropriate forum with greater exposure but I’m not sure how to go about it.

So here’s my 2 cents.

The major problem in my opinion with learning how to use a renderer like Mental Ray is that the current state of the rendering technology and required hardware are so primitive, that in order to know how to use a renderer you are forced to learn also how it is made to work to a degree where you may actually write one yourself.:smiley: I know I’m exaggerating here but I’m saying this to make my point. And for a lot of users that’s not really their goal. I personally don’t want to know and waste my time learning how a renderer works but what and how it can do. However I have a hard time separating one from the other and believe that the progress in the future will improve towards that as ithis has already happened with many other computer related solutions

The purpose of a renderer is to achieve a rendering goal as faster as possible, and this puts the required learning time into the calculations.

If one renderer including its learning resources excels against other in achieving this goal I would label it as a superior solution.

#705

I feel I should step in with some facts …

We highly value Francesca’s contribution to the mental ray user community.

We’re working hard to make mental ray easier here with mental images Training. The third handbook is coming out soon. We offer classes for artists, TDs, and programmers. We are continuing to expand the on-line resources we have on the user group site.

We continue to work hard with the vendors to improve the UI. We know it needs work, and the community’s input is invaluable. Make your voice heard; give feedback to the vendors (eg, Autodesk for Maya) to help them set priorities. Yeah, its hard if you’re in the middle of production, but please don’t forget when you have a break.

As a component of other applications, and a framework for doing almost anything, mental ray has such broad and deep flexibility that it can impede the process of making an easier learning curve. But this greater flexibility should also eventually make it easier to learn, such as when Phenomena are as fully supported as I envision.

From what I can tell of Francesca’s contribution, with a component-based approach, it appears she shares this vision.

#706

how about unlimited MR render nodes for Maya (from commandline) :slight_smile:

#707

hey, cgers,
I have been wanting to try this shader for a long time since I am looking for a way to render out single multichannel openEXR image in Mental Ray for compositing in Nuke and it seems that ctrl.buffers and/or megaTK is the only solution currently.

I installed the ctrl buffers shader and rendered out several passes, each in individual files, without problem. However, when I change the file format to .exr and check “multichannel” under open.exr tab, I met two problems.

  1. I did get a single openEXR file rendered out, but in Nuke the image looks brighter than Maya’s render view (brighter in Photoshop too).
  2. The only extra channel I got, in Nuke, is called “other”, even though I tried several combination of settings under buffer write node. I suppose to get the other three channels named “blinn”, “lambert”, “ambocc” respectively in Nuke, as I can get three individual openEXR files while rendering with multichannel unchecked.

Is there any other solutions for multichannel openEXR in Maya? I am hoping I can stay with embeded renderer if possible. Thanks. :slight_smile:

#708
  1. Just set ‘colorspace’ in Read node to ‘sRGB’. Nuke mean that your file is in ‘Linear’ color space, it’s default for all floating point formats.
#709

Thanks, Puppet, for your help in here, too. After change the Colorspace to sRGB, the image looks the same as in Maya Render view. :thumbsup:

Do you or friends here have any input for the channel viewing problem that I have? :banghead: It seems that Nuke has problem reading in the multichannel openEXR generated from ctrl-buffers. Because when unchecking the “multichannel”, I got “ambocc.01.exr”, “blinn.01.exr”, and “lambert.01.exr” rendered out as seperate files. That means I can successfully output three channels. However, when checking “multichannel”, I got single “user.multich.01.exr” and read that file in Nuke. Here, I got RGB correctly displayed but with only “one” extra channel listed as “other”. So, I switch to the “other” channel, I got a sort of pink image displayed in viewer. I tried as best as I can to find the blinn, lambert, and ambocc channels that suppose to appear but no luck. :cry:

I am hoping that it’s a user stupidity and if so, please someone point it out. :slight_smile:

I upload the scene file. It’s generated in Maya 7.0.1 with ctrl.buffers.v2.rc5.

#710

Yes I have to agree, although mental ray does not make it easy, what you must learn is valuable. I started on mental ray and stayed with mental ray for years now. My understanding of the theory and framework that mental ray requires you to learn to become very advanced is nothing but a benefit. Two days ago I was running tests of finalRender in maya for the first time. It only took me 5 hours to have every settings in finalRender figured out and have a tuned, optimized GI setup going and producing excellent results. This is because all the theory and framework behind finalRender is quite similiar to mental ray in many ways and figuring out finalRender was nothing more than pretty much learning different syntax, right along the lines of learning different programming languages, the core concepts and framework are highly similiar.

#711

great shaders!

I think it would help new users of this shader (like me) when someone re- upload the video tutorials from francesca!

Thank you.

#712

I’m new to ctrl_buffers and has the same problem as some guys here. I can’t get shader working in maya 8.5.

This kind of error occurs:
PHEN 0.5 info : ctrl.buffers ----------------------------------
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (14)
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (15)
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (16)
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (17)
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (18)
PHEN 0.5 error 051015: cannot map frame buffer: invalid fb index (19)
PHEN 0.5 info : -----------------------------------------------

I downloaded Jozvex’s scene with an example but it was the same. I’m sure it works in maya 6.5.
I was trying to use buffer_api and dummy object as francesca suggested once.
I’ve been reading this great stuff for a week and still can’t find the post with similar problem solved.
Sorry if i missed smth. or all. Just don’t be angry and help me to get it started :slight_smile:

and one more request…Can you re-upload francescas video tut. one more time, please?
Hope to see francesca posting soon!

#713

@Francesca: are you ever going to do the ctrl_buffers tutorial on mymentalray.com or is that site abandoned or what? Has been forever and a day.

I’m sure you are busy. but if things like this were done this forum would prolly have a lot les poeple in here asking how does this work questions. “myself included”

#714

Apparently, Francesca doesn’t post in CGTalk anymore. Whatever reasons they are that might have brought that about, I don’t know. However, I do know this. Doesn’t matter who it is who writes these shaders, or plugins. They don’t owe any of us a favour. They don’t have a responsibility to the community to do this. When they created these wonderful tools, they were doing us all a big favour by helping us. If she so decides to stop helping for one reason or another, or stops due to other reasons, honestly, she doesn’t owe anyone an explanation either.

As much as I wish she was still around to help us and teach us about the finer workings of Mental Ray, I do realise that we aren’t giving her much back in return for her contribution. I’m sure that there definitely are those people who have expressed their thanks in terms of money or gifts, but I’m also very sure that these are the minority among us, which I myself am not a part of.

So I want to thank her now, whether she is reading this or not, or perhaps if anyone here knows her personally, it would be great if you could convey my thanks, and perhaps our thanks to her for her contributions to this not so little community of artists.

#715

I agree with you in many points. I’m not sure if he/she was ever to be rewarded by gifts or money, since the work she does is work work she’s obviously paid for by her boss. but I agree when it comes down to responsibilities and taking care of the community somehow. she shares her tools with us and this is actually more we can ever expect. I heavily use the tools she created and I’m really thankful for that. but no one out there can expect her to work for ‘us’ on improving ‘her’ tools…

anyway. I always thought, she feels fine inside cg-talk since the folks coming from xsi site haven’t been that patient in debugging and testing her tools. I guess she’s admiring, how busy all of us have been testing her shaders, right?

so I clap my hands for what she created, and I hope she pushes things further and further. and if we’re lucky, she’ll share things with us…

cheers
rob

#716

hello guys,

here a mix8layer v1.2 64bit. for those interested.
(didn’t tested, do it yourself and please report here if problems)

max

#717

woot!! ctrl is back… no suckas can hold em down!!

#718

fantastic max…thanks it’ll be tested good…:slight_smile:

T

#719

Any chance for Ctrl_buffers to be port to 64 bits also?

#720

Pure awesomeness. I just got a Core 2 Quad system last week that I beefed up to x64 and I’ve been searching desperately for x64 versions of, well, anything really :slight_smile:

Lots of stuff I could cheat, but the elegance of Mix8/Mix20 was sorely missed there for a while. Didn’t realize how reliant I’d become on the shaders Francesca’s been sharing with everyone here over the last few years as I’ve been slowly peeling back the daunting shell of mental ray. So, many many thanks. You guys over at ctrl rock!

–T