its too quiet in here.

#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:

#32

best caustics i could get out of messiah so far:

#33

and this is with absorbtion enabled (notice how it filled out the liquid towards the center)

29 minutes to render at 900 x 675

oh yeah, once again hats off to Thomas for his excellent shaders (and excellent documentation). I am using the distance node, math nodes, easy glass and color nodes. Now i have to go in and use meta effectors to fill in some of the stray blobs that got under my distance node, then i have to animate the effectors to track the blobs and animate the lights and then render. :slight_smile: soon i will have my very first messiah render project! woohoo! Lets hope the caustics dont flutter around like lightwave!

#34

Man I have not spent a day in AE for many months But That LOOKS REALLY COOL Thomas !

I know if i get sometime in AE that is the first thing I’ll buy !

( I only buy tools now when they job related, thing do get alittle crazy if I don’t :slight_smile: )

#35

can someone give me a tip on using meta effectors to drive shaders?

#36

Weightspot node, then plug it in too whatever you desire.

#37

Not sure what you need to know, but here is a simple set up;

R

#38

the problem that im seeing is that after i position the weight effectors in setup mode, the weight value stays the same if i move them in animate mode? is that normal?

#39

I generally make all my adjustments to metaffects in animate mode, but that’s just me

R

#40

so here is a render test. took almost 12 hours for 100 frames lol.

the caustics is OUCH (flickering)! Looks like i need to increase the gather count. There are also weird popping triangles all over the place??? weird…

Here check it out, its only 1 meg.