I see that in messiah’s SDK there’s an Align function. I need such a tool that can align an object in world coordinates to another object which is part of a hierarchy. I do not need the NULL parented to the other object.
How should I do this?
Edit: It seems the SDK functions I referred to are actually expression functions which can be used directly in messiah via the GUI.
Well, you seem to have found out on your own - that would be one of the most basic expressions in messiah, called “Align” 
As your edit says, you can use the expressions from within the SDK too, but for normal work, the expressions have plenty of functions to work with - no real coding needed.
messiah is in fact still my favorite app when it comes to expressions.
Many functions, easy to use, very fast and very flexible 
There is good info on this part, hidden under “General Information” in the docs
Cheers!
640 x 480
38sec render time
AA = Adaptive SS, Level 3, Threshold 0.005
Sphere light with raytrace shadow, quality 3
One of the objects in my sequence. A replica of a trophy I received in 1993 in the South African Air Force TV unit.
This is a quick test render and I still need more effort on the metal shader for this one. I like this render because my trophy is finally really well polished, although only virtually. And the best is it will never tarnish and never needs buffing . . . 
I used the default Metal material which comes with messiah, but modified with a minmax node to rerange the bump values. Also added a TLHPRO Ambient Occlusion node.
Render time is horrid. I’m trying my own simpler metal material. I really really wish there was a good and fast soft reflect feature, even if it uses a cheat method.
I also wish there was a micro scratch procedural texture to simulate either random scratches or more uniform buffing scratches found on metals. These scratches are so fine that they hardly qualify as bumps, but without them metal just looks like fake CG. Simulating them using bitmaps is useless since you’d need a map of about 10000x10000 and then still run the risk if pixellation. So that’s prohibitive. Using procedural bumps streaked like brushed metal into one direction is the right idea, but not quite. Micro scratches are nearly never straight, often running in arcs of many overlapping directions mixed onto one metal surface.
The metal preset is absolutely crazy IMO. It renders forever and doesn’t even look too good for my taste.
You will be better off doing your own materials - the factory stuff is the first thing I delete after a new installation
As for interesting procedurals: You should take a look at the darktree/simbiont shader. There are tons of good presets coming with it (including interesting scratched metals) and while it isn’t the fastest, the quality is great - and it is free!
Wegg swears on them…
Getting what you want is supertricky: if the scratches are too small, you won’t see them and they will make AA extremely complicated - if they are too large, they look fake.
Using a texture like this on bump is almost never giving the wanted result. Often it looks better to have it on glossiness (set glossiness rather high and subtract the texture with reduced strength on top of it so that the scratches have a more outspread highlight) or even on diffuse.
Anisotropic specular can also help - it basically fakes the result of microbumps.
As for texture resolution: you can easily tile such a texture since it isn’t obviously visible, so even a texture size of 512x512 can be sufficient when used with a good UV map (see the new blender release) or for simple objects a cubic projection…
Cheers!
Thanks for your input, Thomas. You have a good number of tips which I need to sit and think about and perhaps test. In the meanwhile, here’s my latest attempt with my own material which I think manages to replicate my trophy appearance (from a distance) accurately without being too picky. Render speed is also acceptable. Read more details below . . .
If you feel that the diffuse on this is too high, remember this is an older trophy from which the highly reflective chrome has been rubbed away leaving a less reflective surface and revealing the more plain metal colour. I have added hand-painted patina maps for the dirt buildup in the corners. I also added a slight warmth to the metal. This is the underlying brass starting to slightly show through the chrome, especially evident on glancing angles. This aged metal is part of my animation sequence theme which I’ll post as soon as I’m done.
Talking about done, my self-imposed deadline is running out and I’m running into overtime, so to speak. I’ll attribute that to the messiah learning curve :), fiddling with shaders, etc. I also introducing more complexity into my concept to achieve a stronger theme.
To reduce the brushed metal effect on glancing angles, I plugged fresnel into noise contrast and that did it nicely. Noise, by-the-way, is mapped cylindrically to achieve the brushed metal. This may be problematic during animation, but a post filter may likely solve any bumpmap shimmering.
One thing I notice on real metal is that soft reflections (reflection blur) tend to become softer the further the reflection ray has to travel. Nearly like soft shadows generated by messiah’s cool sphere lights. In other words, looking at the trophy, where the stem attaches to the cup, the sharper reflections would be at the attachment, while the softness would increase further up the side of the cup. The same would be true of the handle attached to the cup. Reflection blur most definitely falls away on glancing angles, making a blurred surface nearly perfectly reflective from a sharp angle (or shallow angle, depending how you see it).
Great studies! Will you be using motion blur on the final animation? If so, soft shadows and motion blur don’t seem to play well with each other. My limited testing with motion blur from the past and just recently still reveals very grainy artifacts along the edges of the soft shadows.
Thanks for the motion blur tip, Gary. Not sure what the motion challenges are yet. I’m trying to stay away from MB . . .
same specs as above except shadow quality = 5
1min 48sec render time
It now looks pretty close to the real one on my desk. Time to move on . . .
It continues to improve greatly. Nice job. Athough I’m not quite seeing where the “rub-through” is. I think I know where it is - but it’s exhibiting the same reflective quality as the original shiny plating. You mentioned the underlying surface is brass. Is the brass on the actual trophy as reflective as the original polished plating?
Interesting thread on reflections and such at the NewTek forum - interesting read and relates to some of the things you mentioned ealier. It would be interesting to test some of those examples in messiah.
Maybe it’s just me, but personally, I think the brushed metal look needs more anti-aliasing…and/or possibly a smaller bump value. But the images all thru the thread have been really nice. I haven’t actually worked my way thru texturing, altho’ I’ve used messiah from the beginning. Part of that is that I really haven’t been forced to as yet. But that day is rapidly approaching.
Best,
Rick
Thanks for the encouragement. :bounce:The rub-through is where the silver softly transitions to the pink colour. It is subtle, nothing dramatic, and yes, the underlying metal is also as smooth and reflective. I don’t have my digital camera here (loaned to friends on holiday from the UK), else I could have posted what the real thing looks like.
Thanks for the crit. Yes, you are right. I was using the brush metal to blur the reflection but then there’s a trade-off with the brush streaks. I may test finer settings . . . but here’s a more subtle version which uses a fresnel input to noise contrast of 0.0 to 0.1 instead of 0.0 to 0.5.
1min 51sec render time
That’s looking better! Maybe lay it back justa bit more. The front highlight area really makes it seem like the texture is small/bumpy rather than fine line brushing. Not to be picky, but everything else is working so well on all the other images, it would be a shame to not mention it.
Don’t know if it would help add a level of control for the effect, but have you split out the lights so that the specular and diffuse are handled separately?
Best,
Rick
I’ve updated the image above - forgot to also tone down the bump on the outside of the trophy. Below is a version without brushed metal so we can see what that looks like. Please feel free to comment!
There’s no specular on the metal, and diffuse is driven by a fresnel node.
1min 34sec render time
Just did a filter pass on the image to see if there will be shimmering artifacts during motion and more specifically during interlacing. It’s not looking good on the grainy bits (see highlight on the side of the cup). Interlace flicker for sure.
My conclusion is (based on previous suggestions on this thread) . . .
(1) render straight reflection, no bump
(2) do a special render pass to isolate surfaces that need blurring - generate a black & white image
(3) use image as alpha channel for a blur comp in Digital Fusion
The above should be set up with fresnel fall-off taken into account.
If I do this, I’ll post results and my intermediates.
I did a quick test with a 2D blur pass, broken into 2 layers, one for the trophy outside and one for the inside. Hit the first snag…surface details like rub-throughs and blemishes and those things all get blurred. :sad: So the solution would be a more complex layered setup to achieve this. Not something for now.
Now for something related but different . . .
Below is a test I did in Digital Fusion which shows (A) no blur and (B) a soft region gaussian blur on the cup just above the stem which is roughly accurate to real life. I may manually add this into my rendered scene afterwards, but for now I’m just showing it as a goal I would ideally like to achieve.
Old (bg) and new (fg) South African Flag Pins which you pin onto your jacket. Lack of reference makes judging scale difficult for now. They will be a very small incidental part of the final scene.
The metal surround is a simple hand sketched and extruded LW object which was then metaNURBed. The flag is a rectangular grid which was metaNURBed and then deformed in messiah using a few bones.
The deformed flag was then frozen using messiah’s SaveMorphSequence, but only for one frame. All UV mapping was preserved with the export. It was then reloaded in LW as a rigid, non-deformable part of the pin, single objects which can be easily loaded into my final messiah scene.
Pretty basic stuff. Messiah’s deformation and export features really made this so easy. Of course credit goes to LW also.
Great to see your progress. I enjoy seeing how you problem solve. Using bones in a linear fashion to deform the flags is very cool to see. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Gary. I appreciate your appreciation.
So far I’ve been testing metal shaders and modeling various elements of a concept which I haven’t really nailed down since the client gave me creative freedom. I’m moving towards a final design in my imagination and I’ve made some good steps towards putting it all together. I’ve made a really rough sketch study of item placement and wide starting camera angle.
My concept is based on a still life, something grounded in reality, not abstract, something with a depth and wealth of detail. This is what I hope to bring about.
I’ve just exported low-poly versions of my main objects and started setting up the above scene. The low-poly stuff obviously helps for easy scene setup, animation and test renders.
With the full quality meshes loaded, my 1GB RAM gets used up and I’m slightly worried about the final render. I’m starting to imagine drastic measures like renting a render farm . . . :sad: Let’s see how it all goes. One positive thing was seeing that some low-poly objects actually retain enough quality to be used in the final render. But not all objects benefit like this.
thanks pmG for this handy function