its too quiet in here.

#12

You know if the render times are low enough. . . it wouldn’t be unreasonable to save out your particle animation at a super high frame rate. . . like. . . 240 fps, render it in Messiah at 240 fps and then in After Effects bring it back down to 24 fps with frame blending.

And you could even take it a step further. . . Using http://www.revisionfx.com/mblurdownloads.htm
on the 240fps version and THEN poping it back down to 24fps with Frame Blending. Lots of control/options there.

Its sad that we have to work around stuff like this. The beta version of LW (9.2) has some really nice DOF and Motion Blur solutions built in. :sad:

#13

yeah, i think the key it to support the included vectors. Wouldnt it be cool if messiah supported realflow tight like a tiger? think about it. it renders reflection/refraction so fast! And current lightwave hackjob of an implementation is bound to make a few grown men cry.

wegg. i see what you are saying about making it super fast. problem is those meshes you see, all 128 of the sequence, took a day to process! just to make the mesh…

the more detail your water is, the more particles and smaller mesh size you must use! and that EXPLODEES the polycount, i used optimization to reduce the polycount too, but it brings messiah and any other app to its knees trying to scrub through thsoe. IT would be cool if Realflow used a combination of lower poly base mesh + normal maps! haah but im pipe dreaming again.

#14

Stooch did you check out Taron’s new “toy”? Watch the videos. Its AMAZING how fast it calculates caustics, environment reflection, refraction etc.

LinkToMovie

I’ll bet you could do some crazy things with RealFlow, Messiah and Taron’s plugin.

#15

Holly cow. I had no idea.

You should try and export out a more simple “sphere” version of the particle simulation and drive its shader with a wobbly noise into its displacement. I’ll bet you could simulate some nice vibration and organic motion in the water. . . while maintaining the spirit of the simulation in the Real Flow export.

#16

oh yes, i have plans for his plugin in the future. Right now im focusing on getting another reel out :slight_smile: and unfortunatelly, you would still need to generate those depth maps from realflow for it to be applicable here, which would require those pesky meshes… unless they can figure out how to render the depth maps out of the RF particles and have apporpriate smoothing mechanisms… there i go pipe dreaming again.

good idea on the noise! ill mess with it in messiah. oh oh, might need AON shaders… damn you thomas.

#17

is there a caustics expert in the house? id love for someone to shed some light on getting good, sharp caustics.

#18

Expert - No.

I found caustics rather hard to use and get looking good in messiah. First rule is to put the number of photons as high as possible (until messiah crashes that is). Everything else is tweaking and patience.
I wasn’t able yet to get as crisp caustics as with other renderers though.

And some things are plain wrong with the implementation. Can’t remember it all, but make sure your spotlightsource isn’t too small (then the caustics vanish).

Good luck,

P.S. what’s wrong with AoN? :slight_smile:

#19

nice example stooch :slight_smile:

R

#20

So close i can smell it!

#21

<sniff> <sniff>

Smells like a peppermint mouthwash explosion.:thumbsup:

#22

lol absolutely nothing!

Yeah so i messed about with caustics, it either caused my lighting to completely blow out or ended up in big round blobs all over my scene… so i think caustics is out for me… :frowning:

#23

yep, for this scene with all those little water particles, I guess you would need numbers of photons messiah simply can’t produce without crashing. They work best for “glass sphere on floor” scenes, everything more complex is asking for trouble. :wink:
You also have to balance the light intensity, light size, photon amount and photon intensity to get the brightness right…

As far as ZBornToy goes: IMO it is just that, a toy (even if a very cool one) looking for an application. Since you can’t have objects behind objects in a depth map based approach, you are very limited in practice. I created some cool eyecandy with the demo but can’t imagine using it for anything but very “specific” projects.
But yes, the caustics are close to perfect…

Here is one of my tests with it (Quicktime 7):
ZBornToy_Test

As for Motionblur: the new Motionblur options in AfterEffects 7 should be able to deal with something like your scene. It actually analyzes pixel motion, not just frame-blends. Works great in some cases but not in others. Give it a try.

Cheers,

#24

Really cool test Thomas looks great! :thumbsup:

Stooch have you tried setting the MAX substeps in RF to a lower setting that speeds up the calculation quite a bit.

About the motionblur, I understand realflow meshes needs a special approach, but as I understand it we miss motionblur on regular animated objects too, right? A motion vector pass should work great together with, revision fx´s, reelsmart motionblur since it support them.

#25

In my last test, motionblur worked not only for the camera but for everything as expected.
But since it is implemented like the old LW motionblur (re-rendering the whole image at different time slices and comp them together), you need a lot of passes to get stutter-free looks for fast motion.
Antialiasing can become a problem too.

Not a real 2006-solution I fear.

Cheers,

#26

Not future tech but nice anway. I still think a motion pass is the way to go especially if the could implent a shader for the image_filter material to use the pass inside messiah.

#27

reelsmart needs moving vertices to figure out the motion blur. Again, these meshes are static, ill play with AE blur.

i just had an idea, maybe i can comp a depth pass of my liquid and use zborn toy to generate the caustics and blend them with my output? that might work…

#28

Yes I know, but for other moving things in Messiah.

#29

soo. can someone from pmg or in the know explain how the particular messiah solution works in principle? the documentation is sparse at best, i want to have an understanding behind the hood a bit to fine tune my results.

thanks!

#30

For motion blur? Its just like Lightwave’s older multipass solution where each pass shifts the model slightly along its motion path and its all accumulated in the end to create the “blur”. No?

#31

oops sorry, i was talking about caustics. :slight_smile: