EasyGlass test

#41

much better. :wink:
render time/cpu?
are you using TLHpro?
do you can get the same result without TLHpro?

#42

Normal Glass isn’t the problem as I showed above in the drinking glass examples. But colored Glass is quite complicated.
chikega, you are right, the overbright areas are me playing with translucency a bit, since otherwise it looked all so dull and caustics took ages while looking bad either. :slight_smile:

The best function in the new versions is the surface tinting, which allows for halfways decent full transparent glass that is still colorized - and throws colorized shadows if you enable transmissive shadows in the object.
I think I will code a “thickness in refraction direction” into TLHPro Thickness to make the absorption looking better. The Thickness shader could also use some more options like calculating thickness only for front polys (which I did in the above scene by using a DoubleSider node)…

My glass doesn’t look that much different from yours, just that tiny image doesn’t show much of the goodness. I really had it yesterday…
Will do a new start later on…

Cheers,

#43

The above image was rendered with stock messiah. It took me hours to figure out how to have the glass react correctly. I essentially used the old Lightwave way of doing glass. For whatever reason, the air polygons, within messiah has to be set to .99999 instead of 1. I came up with that number after hours of experimentation. I think Thomas and I must be masochists :). I purchased TLHPro today and I’m looking forward to putting it to good use.

I rendered one image at 640 X 480, AA Level 3, Monte Carlo -GI Samples 3, Depth 2 with with a Pentium IV 3Ghz ( I can’t believe it’s almost 3yrs old now). It took 15min14sec.

I rendered another at 1240 X 1024, AA Level 4, but with a little bit of soft reflection and soft trasparency … at it took 1hr13min!

Something else I learned, I had to have the Ray depth set to 5 to be able to see the texture of the stomach through the glass - otherwise, the stomach object appears black. I’m guessing that this may have something to do with the extra geometry (two objects occupying the same space).

#44

Removed …

#45

chikega:
welcome back aboard :wink:

yes, that bit about ray depth 5 needed sounds logical: there are four surfaces for the ray to go through in a bottle, so there is no ray left for the reflection on that stomach. And if the raycount is hit, the background/environment color becomes visible (or the color without reflection).

I also found that 0.9999 or 1.00001 for air-refraction is needed since a value of 1.0 disables refraction calculations… :frowning:

Best regards!

#46

Thanks Thomas, glad to be back - but it’ll be even better when you send me my TLHPro license!!! The “thickness in refraction-ray-direction” mode looks wonderful!

:bounce:

#47

Thomas,

I’m reminded of that line from one of the Godfathers movies where Al Pacino says something like this “…every time I try and leave, I keep getting sucked right back in” or something like that.

Thank goodness you keep getting sucked back in on Messiah development. All I can say it wow :thumbsup: , great work, lets hope you have a relapse on your back problems so you can keep on working on TLHPro (not really)

R

#48

Removed …

#49

hey, here is a cleaned up scene from LW for the reflection challenge, i made sure to put all the pivots on the bottles to make it easer to select stuff.

http://www.stooch.net/misc/ReflectionChallengeLW.zip

#50

Yeah, selecting stuff is a real pain in messiah. In scenes from external sources like this, there is virtually no way to see what is selected in the viewport and selecting in the world view is more or less a game of luck.
I think at least in wireframe mode there should be some kind of color hint on what is the current object.

Thank you for your effort, Stooch.

Cheers, :bowdown:

#51

I have found that AnimateImmediate is good for ordinary selection, just middle-click when the object you want to select is highlighted! :thumbsup:

/ Svante

#52

Svante: Thomas is referring to scenes imported from external sources - there is no immediate highlighting, one cannot even change the draw mode of an object from wire to smooth - it remains a wireframe. Download Thomas’ scene to see what we mean.

Dmitri: Thanks for you efforts, it makes it a much more pleasant experience.

Thomas: I agree with selecting things in World view, it’s hit or miss when selecting. I find that I have to resort to the object list just to select lights, especially lights - it doesn’t work with immediate highlighting, animate … nada. I guess one can get rather spoiled when working in apps like XSI with very intuitive, fast and accurate manipulation of objects. modo is very nice as well … they’ve even included an object (item) mode to select with. No more relegating objects to layers, or select connect.

The black shadow is something I’ve come across as well in my experiments - hopefully Taron/pmG is on it. The Thickness shader looks very nice … and approximates modo’s built-in Beer’s Law of Absorption when rendering glass.

I’ve been playing with a modo 201 sample scene. It’s purportedly very quick due to it’s irradiance caching abilities. The below render took 46min at 640 X 480 on a Pentium IV 3.0Ghz - it shows a lil’ bit of everything from depth of field, transparency, caustics, etc…

#53

I don’t know, in this scene, the Immediate mode didn’t seem to work - is it possible that objects with zero diffuse aren’t highlighted or did I something wrong?
I tried several things to get Immediate working, since it was my first idea too, but no way - the meshes stayed always black.

BTW. That transparent OpenGL View is a pain as well - you just can’t see anything usefull for fully transparent objects in shaded mode - I found a workaround in the meantime (setting the transparency with a separate Color node instead of in the material) but it would be cool to have an option to not use transparent GL - or an improved way of showing it over that dotted clouds of nothing :wink:

Basically I would still prefer to have shortcuts for select/rotate/scale/translate that work as long as I hold them down (supra mode in XSI). I seem to be incompatible with the navigation etc. in messiah from day one - I always press the wrong buttons or drag in the wrong direction … :wink:

Well, back to coding and thanks for the reply!

Cheers

#54

In one of the modo vids, Brad was addressing the very same issue concerning transparent OpenGL by placing the object’s shader tree (or entire scene) underneath a solid shader that can be turned on and off when the need to to rework the geometry is in order - essentially over riding the individual objects OpenGL modes.

I thought that the Render Group in messiah could do something similar, but it’s effect is only on rendering and not on the OpenGL display of individual objects. :frowning:

The Smooth Wire mode through the Viewport looks pretty decent though and is applied globally to the scene - it will work for the time being.

#55

Ah - synchronous posts :slight_smile:

Thanks chikega for the conformation of the problems - I thought I go crazy once more…

So you’re a modo-betatester?

46 minutes doesn’t sound completely out of reach for other renderers. So at least they didn’t find the holy grail of speed yet :slight_smile:
Do you happen to have it rendered without DOF too? The blurry look makes seeing the features a bit hard, but it sure looks great.
I don’t know if you are allowed to talk about it, but what do you think so far?
I too found the material layer idea from the online video weird for everything but rather simple scenes - I can’t imagine how you are supposed to work with 500 surfaces… :wink: Is it manageable?
Any good ideas that I should include in TLHPro until modo comes out >LOL<

EDIT: Be all carefull with RenderGroups. They can really slow renderings down. I thought they would overwrite underlying materials completely without noticeable overhead, but lately I had a scene which rendered very slow without reason until I assigned the material to each object individually instead of putting it onto a rendergrop on top of the original materials. And it was all 100% opaque so it shouldn’t have been bothered with the underlying textures… :shrug:

Cheers and thank you! :wavey:

#56

modo 201 was released yesterday - so, I’ve only been playing with it for less than a day. So, far from what I can tell, the rendering time seems well within reach of other renderers. Other users have been expressing how much quicker it is than LW and/or Fprime.

As far as layers goes, I haven’t played with it enough to have an opinion. I’m a bit disoriented. But, I did notice one situation where it may be quicker than plugin nodes. For instance, if I wanted one procedural texture node to drive four materials in modo, I would just place the proc. texture node above the four materials - instead of clicking dragging and dropping four times in messiah.

The interactive render preview is very very nice … it’s like having VIPER, G2 and Fprime, combined in LW.

The layers can be organized, labelled and collapsed, so it feels like working with Explorer in Windows - There are tons of vids showing off it’s virtues on the Luxology forum - so, if it intriques you, check it out.

P.S. Thanks for the heads up with Render Groups

#57

you know that modo 201 is out right?

#58

I did completely miss that release… LOL :rolleyes:

I don’t own modo anyway and don’t plan to buy it, but I sure will have a look at those vids. Always nice to see something new…
Sometimes I can extract ideas for my own tools for messiah and XSI from such inspiration :slight_smile:

Well, keep us posted about what you find!

Cheers,

#59

oh i will keep you posted too, getting my copy asap!

#60

You’ve got the right idea, Thomas, by sticking with one or two apps and being done with it. I’m all over the friggin’ place … when will the madness end!?:eek: