Latest news from pmG!

#1

In our latest dash of development we’ve written massive improvements into the shading, rendering, interface and saving sections. From having the standart material to be perfectly sufficient for all shading needs I can spontaneously think of to a new edit sphere that acts far more natural and allows for even new comfort in editing to improved antialiasing for HDR image lighting and actually anything that shows an illumination above 1.0. And that’s hardly beginning to name the countless improvements and additions we’ve made in the last 3 months. We’re having one of our most productive times in a long time. The particles alone where a massive push, even while those have invited a change that goes a lot deeper and has the valid potential to speed up the entire and already fast rendering engine! But because we’re covering such a large amount of little and bigger corrections and improvements and so forth in pretty much every field, we’re discovering potential innovations in quite a few sections that our “we just HAVE to do that”-list is swelling again.

Our current approach to things has become a little more cautious in terms of releases, though, and we’re trying to run our versions by the beta testers progressively to not overwhelm them with changes and see piece by piece if anything goes wrong and, well, you know what betas are for! Now we’re facing a brand new problem. We’re developing so fast that we can hardly keep up with releasing stuff. The moment we release a version, we have already added a whole bunch of things that will have to go into the following release. It’s been three times like that already in the last 2 months, I believe. So we’re going strong and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff happening inside. I will keep a few things secret, but I can already tell you that the shading has reached a new level that could be considered an improvement on the very foundation of contemporary shading concepts. In principle it still has the same parameters you know, except for the additional tintings for everything tintable (reflections, transparency, translucency…), but it behaves more natural than ever when it comes to glossiness of the surface and the diffuse shading. I believe, renders of artists will look a lot better by default and feel a lot more natural and coherent. We’re introducing dimension to elements that were left without any before and still are everywhere else. Things are not kept a secret to introduce suspense, (hints serve that purpose! :p) but to prevent locking us into something while we’re still adding to it! Although I would love to hear somebody say I’d be teasing, I don’t mean to, but instead I want to make you understand, we’re alive and kicking and even stronger than ever!
I’m these days just a little bit distracted with another wicked development, but it all will soon merge to go hand in hand and there’s no telling on what this will mean to the near future! Completely cryptical, huh? Well, it’s some realtime stuff and so forth…you’ll see.
Oh, and did I mention…nah, I better don’t…that could become a bit of hairy thing.

So, what does this all mean…well…this means: refined editing of materials in terms of replacing, right button menu improvements, list organisation and all of that is something we will get to before 2008. Maybe even before 2007. Maybe even earlier than that…hmmm… But as Thomas was saying already, with our current slow development and such…oh wait, hey Thomas, I havn’t heard from you in almost half a year!? How are you? Havn’t seen you on the beta either. Weren’t you XSI happy for a long time now? I’m so surprised you still grace us with a sweet comment of yours! We missed you like crazy. We had to start torturing ourselves! It has become ugly really! We need you, oh mighty destroyer of pleasant motivation and provider of pain and anger! Come serve us with:buttrock: unjustified outrage!

<This is Taron’s sense of humor . . . These dates are in reference to something Thomas said in an earlier post and are out of context. . . and are NOT to be taken literally! - Wegg>

Then again, why don’t you go on XSIing for a while, we’re still busy. Plus, we really appreciate someone taking care of the competition there! :wink:

AH…enough for a “good morning” post from me at …what…eh…almost 5pm…oh dear. I currently live in 30 hour cycles, I think…but it’s crazy fun, toO! :wip: :twisted: :lightbulb: :applause: :scream:

This is a big software, even without modeling, and the things that we’re doing are often like squeezing a pimple on a blue whale. Yet, lately we’ve been reshaping its fins, altering the inner organs and even added to the DNA of it. It’s good to hear people complain about the very same things I’m upset about, because that justifies for us to put some greater focus on that specific thing again. We’ll have to finish up our current main focus points and then we’ll take care of the material issues. There are a bunch of things that need to be done.

Thanx everyone! :thumbsup:

Taron

#2

No Man, Tank you !! … now if I only had a chance to beta this stuff, well one can dream,
can’t?

:slight_smile:

#3

cool. its nice to hear that pmg is still alive.

#4

I, for one, don’t appeciate the sarcasm aimed at Thomas. I beleive that his frustration was justified and he spoke on the forum for Messiah users. I have ssen him help a lot of people on this list and he shouldn’t be dissed.

My 2 cents

#5

edited cause i’m too dumb to read lol

#6

If i’ve decyfered this post correctly, and i think i have, there are some sweet things coming up for messiah! Thanks for the tease Taron.

George

#7

He sure did a lot of great things even, but why on earth must he always insult us even while he doesn’t even know what’s going on right now. Messiah went through very turbulent times in the past, worse even times of seemingly standing still. But that is beginning to be YEARS ago in the past and we’ve changed that already dramatically. In fact we’re having a blast doing what we’re doing and that is in fact a stunning amount of work. We’re improving on levels that havn’t even been touched for years and decades in most if not all other packages, while we’re improving on all the basic things that have been bothersome to artists as much as to ourselves. We’re as active as developers could possibly be and as motivated as developers should be. It’s a shame to see how Thomas than carelessly walzes in and disses US without even careing to know what we’re actually doing. His little outbursts can be mistaken for the truth and most likely even are and despite the help he has given to those, who already bought messiah, he alienated plenty of artists, who end up receiving exactly the wrong impression of the team behind the software. If I was reading about some 3d package that does sound interesting to me, but then read that the development team is lazy and useless and what ever else Thomas feels like calling us, I would be concerned enough to look elsewhere instead. And it’s simply nonsense. I probably shouldn’t acknowledge it at all, but damn, it’s just such a sad thing that a man with that much energy wastes it on being negative seemingly for the very hell of it. Not to mention the level of unfairness towards us, as we do put simply all our energy into it and that even with great pleasure, even when it is hard and even when it doesn’t let us sleep at normal times. I see what we’re accomplishing and I am really proud of us and proud of messiah as it shapes up to be what I was always wishing for it to become. As far as I’m concerned, everything I was seeing in it before I even joined in is becoming true. So many people don’t know it, yet, or havn’t realized it, yet, but it’s already for a while one of the most productive tools for animation and even rendering. But currently it is bursting forward to be clearly a massive innovator and reliable companion for full production in these sections. Artists can truely explore with ease and great gratification the nature of rendering objects, creating their shading and texturing. All the things it had been very nice for are now simply becoming stunning. But this happens in so many areas within messiah for a while. While I’m just happy and excited about everything we improve we get hit over the head for everything we didn’t get to, yet. I have to admit, it’s wondersome at times what seemingly simple things don’t seem to get repaired, but it never is really simple and there are complicated things that are connected with those simple things, which even are in the process of being solved and/or improved. Let’s say for instance material editing. We’ve just dealt with the materials themselves, changing the standart material to be completely outfitted with everything it actually needs to have. This meant an addition of features as well as connections and parameters. Changing material types would now have to take those new elements in regard. A lot of these new parameters and parameter adjustments made internal rendering changes necessary, improving the computation of the shading itself, the most inner procedures of the rendering. So a simple change on the outside requires a whole slur of alterations all the way to the core. This is NOT always the case, but especially in terms of materials it’s something important to know!

Ah well, what really matters is that we’re doing our work and we’re doing it with great passion and dedication and I’ve begun taking it personally if somebody attacks our integrity for reasons that have lost validation for a long time already with the appearant urge to chase away people, taking away their chance to voluntarily enrich their lifes as artists with our fruit of passion (hoho…hammm…ah…can I say that?..but it sounds so right!). :argh:

So I’m spending all day today (the “Let Tommy upset me”-day) writing silly replies to decent requests. What surprises me is that this ended up being in “news from pmG”. I wasn’t putting it there as far as I knew…but hey…it’s some kind of news, I guess.

More?
Hmm…?
Nah, I better get back to work! :wip:

Taron

#8

I am new to this section of Cgtalk ( PMG). I am intersted by your product ( I am reading the posts of the forum to have an idea of it) and I haven’t decided yet to invest in messiah. Some points make me doubts.

Honestly, I don’t know Messiah, but I have read that the documentation is “bad” ( missing features or not enought documention (too old) , etc… . People seems to buy Coleman(excuse me if I typel it wrong) to learn how to animate under messiah… means to have to buy for 100$ of Tutorials to complete the missing documentations.

Will you update this part in the next realase: Will you do reformat the documentation and add more complete tutorials ?
There are no “free” tutorials across the net about messiah … (only the tuto on PMG website are available) And that’s scare me … looks like the messiah community is small…and not so active. (sorry I don’t mean to be rude or to offend them).

Seems you spend a lot of work on the render engine. I am personaly interested only by the animation part ( Do you have done improvements to this section? )

Did you fix this interface pblm with “dual screen” and wacom driver… openGL issues …etc…

And finaly will you do promotional price for the next release ?

thanks for your answers.

ps: sorry for my language (english is not my native language) I don’t want to sound rude, I am looking for an animation software like yours ( I have to make my choise between 3 packages). I will wait few days until you post a complete list of the new features. (hope it will be soon, because I have to make a choise(the good one :))

#9

The section I personally favor for a while now is definitely the rendering without a doubt. Not only because I always felt the greatest needs there, looking at all the existing software out there and because I understood the potential we’re having in our system and its openess to animate geometry as well as textures, but also because I always felt very comfortable with the animation tools and features we’re having. After all it was those, which were the building blocks of the whole software and which made it a name to begin with. With all the additional features that came into the mix over time, possibilities just became more appearant and people started to a degree focusing on the stuff they’d still want as opposed to exploiting the great features that are already in there.
Honestly, I personally have not once really looked at the documentation and I’m certainly not the person to talk about it, but I know very much about the tutorials I have to prepare for all the stuff I took part in, not because I feel professionally obligated, but because I want to help artists to come into the joy of using the stuff as strong as they can so I can get to see what you come up with! After having dealt with the particles so deeply, we came up with a system that allows for such great variety of uses and excellent speed and quality that I just can’t wait to see people do crazy stuff with it.
As for standart animation tools and why I don’t feel like I’m the right person to contribute tutorials. I’m doing my work in a very casual and natural way that goes extremely quick and allows for very organic motions, but to the eyes of someone, who doesn’t know in depth what I’m doing, my setups might look like pure hell. I don’t like making handles, I like to grab exactly the kind of part I want to animate. I love using expressions to tie motions together for a more natural process of animation, but the creation of all of that is just as organic and may end up looking like a compost hill…or organic garbage pit…hahahaha…ha…haha…ah…awhhh…so I don’t feel adequate to teach people about some of the more glorious animation features we’re having, like the armatures and such, because I simply hardly use them. Every once in a while I play around with it and I’m fascinated on how great it is to deal with them and the nice and neat type of setup one can make that way. But when it comes down to it, I simple do what I want so streamlined and with little to no obstacle, that I just don’t need it. I’d actually love to teach people how to NOT NEED things they actually may not need and how to simply do exactly what they want to do instead. But that’s almost arrogant I’m afraid, hence I usually rather retreat into what I know I can contribute for sure!
I hope, Fred Tepper will bounce into the thread to not only tell you what to expect next, but also to remind me of what I promissed to do…I’m so submerged into my programming that I may have forgotten one or two things.

Oh, talking about what I would love to teach, I would love to remind artists, that the urge to create and the urge to explore are absolutely best friends! The documentation that exists already is most certainly covering the major features as well as the principles behind most and should be more than enough to get started with it! I think once you’ve put your first set of bones into your geometry and start playing with it, you’ll already see why it is such a smooth ride to get cruising inside of messiah. Don’t be anxious to uncover it all right away. I hope you forgive me out there, if I say this one now, but honestly and sincerely: I can not even remember when I was last running into a dead end anywhere within messiah!
And don’t you dare remind me! :smiley:
It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it, that it is actually simplicity that makes this package great, yet, it is more documentation that is missing…kinda strange I think.

Here’s the thing, though, I have lobbied for it, even while I haven’t followed up on it, yet, myself, to have a big and shiny tutorial section on our website. More so even a little forum on there for direct exchange. What we miss most is more images and animations coming from artists of all levels out there, we are hoping to encourage them to come forward and show their stuff with having a stronger online support & artist exchange section. We have a whole bunch of high-profile users’ and visual effects studio’s work on display, but I think it would be fantastic to see more aspiring artists show their stuff. See where we can support them! Simplicity is a fantastic thing to have for production, but it’s just as fantastic to have it when you trying to get into a new field or trying to excel into the professional world.

Yeah, yah, yaya…it’s a road to take and a way ahead, but we’re like smack in the middle of it and just have to keep the throttle pinned down. :argh:

Thank you very much for being so direct and making it again a good reminder of what artists are looking for right now. When you’re on the developing side it can really happen that you underestimate the need for documentation beyond the basics. Bad excuse, though, because we’ve heard it before…argh… :wip:

Well, thanx and just go and buy it! It’s a great ride and I easly dare to promiss that you won’t regret it! Not to mention that we do have a decent support team. If there’s anything specific you run into, which you do not understand or with what you have a problem with, just go ahead and ask us directly! That should NEVER feel uncomfortable. Unless you have developed any kind of frustration and waited until you felt like rambling and shouting and calling us names and such…ahm…that…ahm…never happened…nope…ahm…shshshshsh! :thumbsup:
No really, we’re there for you making the software, we should be there for you using it, too! :slight_smile:

Taron

#10

Exciting stuff! Good to see you around Taron :slight_smile:
-Adam

#11 
 2008 ? :argh: 
 I was hoping for the next release in 2006. At the latest .... :cry:

Back to the dungeon! No bread and water for you today! 
;)

More important than anything else. Make it rock solid ! Fight the bugs ! :beer:

#12

I’m 99% sure Taron was just poking fun at something Thomas said. That is NOT to be taken literally.

#13

…let me repeat that:

HAHAHAHAHA! :applause:

#14

By the way, I’m not sure if everyone has realized that already, but there are 16 tutorial videos on our website: www.projectmessiah.com

I’m sure that most of you have seen that already, but for those, who are new and don’t know if there’s anything, there’s most certainly a good way to start looking!
I’m also absolutely convinced that very soon more videos will go there!

Taron

#15

Thanks for your answer.

you seem impassioned by your work. But I prefer behave carefully and to judge the software with “tests”(for real) . I have been despointed by other softwares (I hope that a demo will be available soon). I understand the power of messiah, but I am not a technician : Sometime good tutorials and a good documentation could help (sorry maybe I am an old ( old fashion)… but I like to read documentations before to open the software. (I use computer but I still read books ;). note: I know you can learn by “tweaking”, but it’s good to have a good doc, to help you time to time to find your answers …

what interests me, it is to take in hand the software immediately and create.

I know you like the render part… (but for me there are so many render engines, it’s just one more on the market). sorry to sound rude but I prefere to be honest. (they are too much work to reach the level of a renderer like Renderman or MentalR).
Since messiah can export to Maya, Max, Lw … I think it’s better to stay focussed on the animation market (too much render engine are comming too … ) but yes ! YES ! it’s good to have his own render engine ( I can understand you… I am sure I will do the same if I was you).

There is so many work to do ( I know a bit of Kaydara,( now Motion builder) … ie: the workflow is very impressive)), I know your history with LW but Lw was not the best exemple to follow for GUI ;). I am a LW user :wink: (note: your GUI si better than LW)

When I read you, I imagine a big messiah community… but on the forum I see few posts , few answers, small gallery… Do you know why ?

My last question:

Do you know when I can get a feature list of the next version or a free demo version ?

thanks for your time.

#16

Once the next official release comes out we will certainly update the demos as well. At least I would believe so!

As for the rendering. If you read some of the post it will become somewhat clear that our render engine has many points that can make it very appealing to those, who were used to mental ray and co. because it has a rather special ability when it comes to displacements in terms of speed and quality and has appearantly one of the fastest monte carlo GI implementations out there. Some of the improvements we’ve just made actually give it another unique edge, but that’s not really the kind of thing I was planning to tell you. I was planning to tell you about the one giant advantage it has to have our own rendering engine and that is the direct tie to the animation over expressions. The ease of use of the expressions makes them very appealing for animation setups and therefore equally appealing to address shading matters at the same time. Therefore you can easily setup animated displacements, which allow for an unparalleled access to highest detail levels for animation without sacrificing any time during the process of animating itself. It does require a certain level of imagination at this point, but we’re on the verge of implementing realtime displacements for the viewport. At least it is our intention and we’ve already made plans for it. It enables artists to handle the highest levels of quality with an ease that makes it accessable to anyone at home as well as speeding up tremendously the feature film quality required in VFX studios! Sure there are plenty of render engines, but it’s about they way you can make them work for you.

As for documentation, have you ever seen our documentation? As far as I know, we do have a documentation of the software that should cover all the features. Most comlains had been made about the API’s documentation and you don’t sound like someone, who’s interested in writing plugins?! Even if you were, the complains were about very specific issues with the API that are simply not covered entirely, which is bad, but not vital for the “everyday plugin coding”. Although it would be clearly a thing we will take care of, I’m sure it’s not what you’re missing, am I right?

I insist on honesty and therefore welcome your general approach very much, but I would recommend you to follow through with your research before you come to any potentially incorrect conclusions.

As for our community, it’s a weired thing, because a large number of artists are using messiah for animation only, because of its heritage so to say and they use it virtually as a plugin. As a result they would rather be found in forums for other packages, which they use it for. It’s kind of a sad thing. The same thing is also responsible for the lack of images for our gallery which brings me to another idea I just had a few posts down. It’s a gallery for all the messiah users to post their stuff, no matter what level they are at! It would not only help to get a better idea of how many people are actually using it, but also help us to support them even more! I will see that I prepare some kind of an official post for that request! Thank you for reminding me again! :thumbsup:

I’m passionate about almost everything I’m doing, except maybe dealing with taxes but including grocery shopping, if I ever do that myself. It’s because there’s something fascinating and beautiful and even thrilling in almost everything a human being can or has to do. Eventually everything gets perceived, collected, connected, recovered and transformed into what we call our creativity. There’s nothing out there, that doesn’t feed the mind and enrich it’s sortiment to draw from. Even your posts! :smiley:
It is a special privilege to make active use of all these impressions in more than just one form of creative output. Being able to program allows for exploring ones own perception and level of comprehension and to enlarge and refine the set of tools to create even more fluently what all the impressions have grown to to demand from an artist. I mean, I see all the little things that make something real or believable or even simply enjoyable and I so want to make it possible to simply create them without having to improvise on levels that could best be handled by the logic and ‘understanding’ of the software itself, as well as contradictory to that the freedom to improvise with more sophisticated access to the ability of a machine to render images. Sounds all a little to esotherical? Hmmm…it’s a thing that is a little tough to put into words for me. Since I was now finally spending all day with words as opposed to working on the software, I might as well say as much as I could possible want to right now. SOOOO…all of these kind of desires are going right into messiah, not because I care only about you, but because I care about what the software can do for myself. And in doing so, I’m trying to make it so that not only I understand it, but so that everyone can have access to the little wonders that can happen inside. In some regards there’s still a long way to go, but in many others we’re already there actually. You could right now open up messiah and start submerging yourself in a world only framed by your own ideas, which will find themselve inspired to much greater dimensions once you’re discovering the simplicity that could guide you through the most complex constructions. It doesn’t bury you in hidden menues or tons of features with names you’d only find in a library of physics literature.

Ehh…before I really make a fool out of myself…one more little note:

If you just want to get started, just look at the tutorial videos on our site. They are very good! :arteest:

Taron

#17

Argh. Taron, bitte benutze Absätze
:deal:

Bei deinen Romanen springt mein gequältes Auge immer in die falsche Zeile :smiley:

Wow, that sounds great!! RT-Displacements... go PmG go :buttrock:

P.S.: I like your detailed responses.  Don´t stop :applause:
#18

the question is when? hehe…“We ll let you know…”
Anyway that would be cool I really like "textured point " in lw.

#19

hahah ! thanks again.

I don’t know why … the last time I felt like you ( coming on the net and “typing” text like crazy …), it was when I have done a lot of work ( working night and day) and finished it and gave it to the client …
Do you have compiled a final release yesterday ?!! (a gold version ?!!).
Maybe that why you have time to tchat on the forum :wink: need to leave the pressure go…

Ok I am convinced , I will give a try ( I will look for an europeen dealer… in France, if I found … to not pay extra taxes)

I will buy a workstation to test your render engine, but I let you know that I am a render engine’s specialist ( I render a lot :wink: and for differents jobs (commercials, tv, movie, video clip, etc… then if I can’t produce with it ( in a serious pipeline as a render engine ), I will let you know…if not I will let you know too !).

Most of render engines are good for print … but are “obsolete” when animation comes …

I will not judge the demo (2.2) because it will be unfair, I will wait for this new release.
As you understand I give chance to every packages ( I am not a Fanboy :)), I have bought some softwares and I have stopped the “update” step.
Because:

  • no frequent update
  • constant bugs ( serious bugs uncorrected, unable to do my work )
  • no closer work with developers (no reply to mails, bugs reports, features or technical questions )
  • bad “relationship”? no call back, no supports, etc…

Maybe it’s not your case ( It will be my first time with Messiah), but I hope to see some feedback from users of this forum.

I am sure of one thing: I prefere to work with “smaller” company than big one, because the “small” company can bring more quality to their product and dev team is closer to the customers needs.

I am more in a spirit of colaboration(working together) than “me” and the package “alone”.

Thank you for your time. I appreciate.
Hope to read more from you.

I will download the workstation demo. And I will give you a feed back :wink:

#20

Waouh

impressive thread here -> thanks Taron !!!

I am very happy to hear some news from Pmg (a good point --> Pmg is not dead…). :bounce:

I hope you will show us some tips about the next version soon (videos or pictures).

Phil