m:studio 2.4d in use on SA Sports Hall of Fame

#221

To my own disgrace I have to make this admission: to date I’ve been operating messiah without a middle mouse button and as a result I have never learned to activate channels and set keys using those handy little buttons. This is the 1st time I’ve hit a dead end without it. :eek:

Thomas, who just couldn’t believe my ignorance, has insisted I get a MMB quick and so I mapped one of my stylus buttons to do the job.

Apologies also to Thomas’s TLHPro EasyGlass which can now be animated on the IOR channel as seen below. :slight_smile:

Using all three mouse buttons takes me from a Level 2 messiah user to Level 3. That’s still far from the Level 10 where most of you are, but I’m getting there!

#222

With an incredible burst of successive revelations regarding messiah’s features, my TD/mentor (sensing that my blatant ignorance may show itself all too soon in other areas too) has taken me from a Level 3 messiah user to Level 3.25 by showing me settings never before known (to me).

Now my edit sphere has more presence and keyframing works the way I like it.

#223

For 3 times in a row I’ve had messiah crash while rendering. Looking at the performance monitor it is progressively using up more and more ram until at frame 171 it has used up all available RAM and virtual disk. The scene has 5 image sequences as texture maps. 4 of them are 550x550 while the other one is 1400x1200. It seems messiah is not freeing up my RAM after each frame. When I start rendering I’m using 800MB out of 1GB. Then it all just mounts and mounts until at around 2GB it’s had enough.

#224

This time I rendered only 45 frames of the same sequence. The rendering was done before crashing. Same gradual increase of RAM use. Performance Monitor says messiah is using 672MB RAM. This is after the render completed. I’ll have to close down messiah to clear RAM…

#225

Know what? We should present messiah with a medal for finding every possible problem and implementing it reliably. >LOL<
They really hardly leave anything out, don’t they.
Geeeeez.

Memory handling in messiah isn’t especially good - we knew that - but not releasing images from a sequence after the image is rendered until it crashes is really on top of most of those other problems.
Add that to

  • Subdivisions not knowing beforehand if they will fit in the available memory (easy to precompute - memory needs could even be displayed in the GUI where you set the subdivs)
  • Renderings not knowing if they will be able to be saved out afterwards (maybe complicated to precompute?)
    and you have a pretty solid feature set…
    …in the negative area.

I can only guess that someone thought that sequences are mostly used for backgrounds anyway and there it makes sense to cache them…
Well, would make even more sense to have something like the “Image Cache” setting in AfterEffects…

Good catch. :thumbsup:

Would be interesting to test if the networkrenderer initializes each node more reliably, since you can tell him to render - for instance - 25 images in a row per node.
But in your case, you may run into the image initialization problem with mpjs instead…

You know what I dream of?
pmG finding an investor who likes the app and is willing to pump some money into it without breaking it’s backbone (buy-to-die). And then have a team of people kill one of these things after the other and releasing “open beta” updates each month until it is done, including good docs, decent and recent examples for all areas, good material presets, good rigging presets, a good and thorough script library and sure a DVD with tutorials.
A clever product manager with a whip and some sugar bread who is able to finally convince the developers that testing what you do thoroughly is NOT evil.
Add a decent sales manager - no religious guy like brad peebler or steve jobs, but someone who has both feet on the ground and at the same time has and can induce dreams and visions…

Well, the first thing I would advice him to do is change the name of the app. “messiah” is just sick… :wink:

Cheers,

#226

hmmmm…I wonder what pmG would ask to have someone take over messiah? Perhaps I could convince my Father to dip into his offshore account.

OK, change of topic…

[color=Orange]TLHPro DoubleSider is also fantastic for doing simple black and white matte render passes. Simple, but a real time saver.[/color]

#227

Really? How do you use DoubleSider for that?
You make me curious :slight_smile:

Cheers,

#228

My camera flies from outside the watch to the inside and then out again. I render the inner wall of the watch using TLHPro DoubleSider with black and white inputs. Then I render the same thing again but switch the black and white. Now I have a set of matte masks I can use creatively in DF for compositing of my time travel sequence, making sure the effects are masked correctly when looking from outside and inside so they remain inside the watch. In this case DoubleSider correctly identifies what is inside from the camera’s point of view. This is all I need for the comp. Simple and time saving.

#229

Cool! :thumbsup:

#230

Uhh. . . busy. Sorry.

Panel lights. . . ick.

They aren’t like area lights in Lightwave at all. Don’t use them. They just don’t work right.

A simple test I did a while back was to put a panel light behind three or four bars sticking out of a ground plane casting big soft shadows. Its all wrong. Its like. . . all the light comes out from this central point instead of the whole surface of the panel. The shadows it casts are big and soft but they just aren’t right. Where normal spotlights behave exactly like Lightwave’s area lights. Side by side tests proved it for me. I’ll never touch anything else now.

#231

Took Paul Lord and I a LOoooong time of going back and forth and back and forth before BNR got working right with Messiah. Now that it does. . . I don’t even think about using any other renderer.

#232

Was Paul Lord able to overcome the problem with large images in a mpj not rendering in the first frame?

I was able to reproduce this even without network rendering by just opening the mpj in messiah and hit F9 right away without going to the render tab first.

Cheers!

#233

I’ve just been doing alpha channel render passes for my final comp. I had to run through 4 passes of applying black and white materials to alternate surfaces in the scene. This is where Custom Surface Lists (CSL) would be ultra-cool. I know I mentioned it in an earlier post but I believe it would be such a powerful feature that it is worth mentioning again.

Imagine my watch scene with the following CSL’s:
[ol]
[li]default Old - must have all surfaces: old look materials[/li][li]New - all surfaces: new look materials[/li]
[li]Time Travel - only watch face surfaces: live video materials[/li][li]Matte Face - only watch face surfaces: black & white materials[/li][li]Matte Discs - only watch face surfaces: black & white materials[/li][li]Matte Arms - only watch face surfaces: black & white materials[/li][/ol]OK, this describes my project so far. If CSL’s were possible, I’d have only one scene file, with no need for managing cameras, lights, animation and materials across various scene files of the same scene.

Then to top it all, imagine a render list - not a render queue which can render different scenes - a render list which can manage the rendering of these CSL’s like so:
[ul]
[li]default Old - render 0 to 300, buffers = colour, filename = old[/li]
[li]New - render 380 to 875, buffers = colour, filename = new[/li]
[li]Time Travel - render 233 to 450, buffers = colour, filename = time[/li][li]Matte Face - render 233 to 450, buffers = colour, filename = matface[/li]
[li]Matte Discs - render 233 to 450, buffers = colour, filename = matdisc[/li]
[li]Matte Arms - render 233 to 450, buffers = colour, filename = matarms[/li][/ul]Save and hit render. If there are no render crashes :shrug: messiah should render this project without intervention and it all remains setup and contained in one single scene file. Any changes to the basics are naturally propagated through all CSL’s. No mess no fuss.

#234

I agree. Very informative thread Paul … you’re a one man beta tester! Or two if we count your td. :slight_smile: I hope pmG is taking note.

#235

… and then you have something like the Partitions, Passes and Overwrites etc. in XSI… <LOL> :thumbsup:

BTW. If you are desperately in need of a “Set Alpha” shader and Taron doesn’t do one already, I may be able to look into it tomorrow.

On another note: TLHPro: Polygons can do random greyscale values per Object, per Surface and per Polygon. This is a way to create “Object” or “Surface” passes that many compositing tools can use nowadays. You basically create a matte from one certain grey value in post - just make sure you use 16 Bit images, to get best results.

Cheers,

#236

I hope so too, Gary. Thomas has walked this road with pmG and seems to have given up on some stuff. It says a lot for his character that he’s still so positive and contributing to messiah and this forum. In fact, that seems to be true of many long time messiah users and testers around here and that makes this community special. :thumbsup:

I don’t know XSI but I do know what I want :slight_smile:

No, I’m cool, thanks Thomas. With the existing Surfaces List, although it does not yet <ehem> have numerous custom lists, it does allow easy temporary material replacement for alpha passes, although it is a manual affair of setting white then render, set black, then render, set back again. And the problem of remembering which groups were black and which were white for a certain alpha pass.

Sounds good. I’ll remember that in the future. Can’t messiah now also render an objectID buffer? Would you save that in the RLA format? Years ago I could do amazing stuff using objectID rendering in 3DSMax3. One pass captures all the object ID’s and then you just comp to your heart’s delight.

#237

I haven’t ever had that happen. Most of the time I try and avoid using images at all. If it can’t be done with effectors and procedural shaders. . . then I break down and UV the model but its usually only here and there and not all over the place.

#238

The messiah RLA format is just plain image and alpha, nothing else.
That is another long time wish of mine: Fully supporting the enhanced RLA and especially RPF format, including camera information…

True, the Object ID pass in messiah is already there, but if you need it more customizable, the shader may come in handy. And I don’t think there is a Surface ID pass yet.

Wegg: “Avoiding images” is a very special way of doing it… LOL
Well, for me the problem happens with large images that I use for instance as environments.

Is .fxs working with networkrendering finally or is it still .mpj only?

Cheers!

#239

I didn’t compare m:studio’s panel lights with LW’s area lights but I’m getting predictable and acceptable results over here. If a technically correct result is imperative, messiah’s panel lights may not hold up under heavy testing, but my piece requires something that looks good and panels are giving it to me like that. I felt panel lights would simulate the environment in the HDR map, something hard spot shadows wouldn’t do.

The other thing I haven’t managed to get going is motion blur. I tried a test and got no blur even though it was switched on. I’ll perhaps try again to get an effect for the time travel sequence. If not, I’ll just drop it and get the project delivered. Any areas that need smoother motion could also benefit from interlaced rendering since this is for TV broadcast - if that works in messiah!? :shrug: Generally I like keeping things progressive since then there’s no problems with format interchange. Progressive also generally renders faster than interlaced.

#240

Paul: Spotlights can be used like panel lights in later messiah versions, just set the Disk Width and Height and dial up your shadow quality…

Motion blur is a bit weird in messiah:

With the Motion Blur setting you define how many passes are rendered, and the Blur Fraction defines how much of the frame is used for MB.
But the Motion Blur setting is closely interwoven with your AA settings - the higher AA passes, the better it looks.

In the back of my mind there is a note that Motion Blur didn’t work for camera motion, just for object motion. :banghead: Was that ever fixed?
Best make a simple example scene and try some things out.

Messiah can’t render out motion vectors AFAIK, otherwise you could do MB in post…

I don’t think you can render interlaced in messiah. If you need fields, you have to render out with 50 fps (PAL) or 60 fps (NTSC) and create the fields in post.
Longer rendertime, but very flexible for format conversion.

Cheers,