misss tests

#701

I’ve rendered about 20+ minutes of character animation with this shader so far and haven’t had any flickering issues at all with it. Are you writing the lightmap locally or leaving it to be written to RAM?

#702

hi wurp

flickering is usually connected to scale issues between the scene/model and the shader
or…too low samples settings for the lightmap, in my experience…and i too have produced ad’s using the shader…with no flicker and all in all troublefree really

Cheers

Timefly

#703

thanks zap, I’ll download it now and see if that fixes it :slight_smile:
anth

#704

Hi

I did model and creat texture for it (6k)

using misss_fast_Skin_maya shader.

when i try to render more than 2k resulation follwing messege is coming and render aborted.

[size=1]file2 is not a memory mappable file, use imf_copy to convert it to .map format, to improve the performance.

  • file3 has a resolution of 6000x6000 which may be unefficient.

[size=3]How can I convert the texture to .map format using utility like mental images’ imf_copy. (I could not find like this type of utility )

can some body help to me

Thanking you
sadaphule

[/size][/size]

#705

Hey mate, you could have searched the forum on another thread Daniel (I think) gave me this cool and simple .bat file:

just click and drag the texture file on the .bat and it will generate a .map file at the same location, I use it all the time:

REM @ECHO OFF
REM Simple mass file conversion using imf_copy
REM by Daniel Rind, enjoy
REM modify the imf_copy line to change parameters
:convertfile
@IF “%1” == “” GOTO end
imf_copy -p -r %1 “%~d1%~p1%~n1.map”
@SHIFT
@GOTO convertfile
:end
@ECHO.
@ECHO Done!
@pause

Just do a search and you’ll find the link I’m talking about :slight_smile:

#706

Thank you Pickman for ansaring to me

I searched the Daniel thread, but could not find

I find on the LAmrUG.com (image utilities (imf_*), ) but now that file is temporarily not available.

is there any anather way?

thanks again Pickman

#707

Try the memory_mapped_textures_scripts.mel from http://www.noboundrees.com/yinako/mayamel.html
Btw, the imf_ tools come with your maya installation - check your bin directory.

#708

Hey sadaphule
Try what Floze said or just copy paste the bunch of code I gave you in a text file and rename it as a .bat, and there you go, just click and drag your texture file on it, it will generate the exact same file in .map format.
It can’t be simpler than that :slight_smile:
Good luck.

#709

Thank you very much “Pickman” & “floze”

realy you show me the way, thanks a lot again

sadaphule

#710

I’m not sure if there are any planned revisions/updates of the MISSS shaders but two things I’ve noticed lately are that:

  1. Complex models take a very long time to generate lightmaps if you’re using raytraced area shadows. This doesn’t exactly surprise me, but maybe it would be cool if there was an option to reduce the area shadow sampling for the lightmap calculation? Similar to the way you can use a second set of sampling for shadows appearing in reflections etc.

  2. Yesterday I was rendering a character with the misss_fast_simple_maya shader, plus Final Gather and everything was going fine, but then I turned off ‘Pre-multiplied’ in the framebuffer options and the character became super bright! Like a light source kind of bright. The character has no transparency or anything so I don’t think it was any normal behaviour. I’ve done this before on other models using misss but I wasn’t using Final Gather at the same time, so that might be part of it. Does anyone know how to fix that? Or is it a bug?

#711

Reading 50 pages made me exhausted…:frowning:

Finally get SSS work. so great, I could dream about real skin now :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

#712

I’ve made a simple network to output each layer of misss_fast_skin to separete file through francescaluce’s ctrl_buffers. But for that I make 5 misss_fast_skin shaders and turn each layer’s weight to 1 and the rest to 0 sequentually. Since misss is a phen, maybe there’s a way to set up smth more straightforward without 5 shaders that unnecessary slow down rendering process. Any ideas on that?

#713

Someone here might want to try making a Phenomenon that combined the fast_sss component shaders with the ctrl_buffers shader.

There still may be some extra computation, because the fast_sss component could be broken down a bit more, or pass out multiple values, but you are right that it would be better than what you’re doing now.

BTW, this sounds like an excellent exercise for our upcoming training class ‘Developing mental ray Phenomena’. :slight_smile:

#714

I’m not quite sure if I got the problem, but have you had a look at my pseudo monolithic phenomenon, Bart? The misss_fast there is being split out as a separate buffer that afterwards might be comped in screen mode.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=81416

#715

floze, I’ve already read about your monolith, but haven’t tried it yet. As well as I remember, misss is one of the passes there, but whole misss. I’m talking about separating layers in misss_fast_skin in different files - diffuse, epidermal, subdermal, back and specular (which for now holds also reflectivity). If I understood you correctly :slight_smile:

I’m not into making phenomenons yet, but it seems i’ve build network for such output.

Actually, I’ve desecrated misss_fast_skin declaration, found what it consists of and made a network for ctrl_buffers upon that.

We need to feed ctrl_buffers with shaders, right? So I need to make 5 misss_fast_shader’s anyway. In misss_fast_skin_shader one fast_shader - “shallowscatter” (which runs epidermal layer and recieves misss_lambert_gamma) is plugged into another one - “deepscatter” (which runs subdermal and back layers and recieves bump and specular). Since I need to separete each layer to speciefic shader anyway - I’m not doing this plugs for ctrl_buffers - i plug lambert_gamma in fast_shader for diffuse layer and leave all other diffuse shader slots empty. To say the truth - I don’t know whether this is right or not or should I include a dublicate of that “shallowscatter” to plug it in sub/back/spec pass_shaders, since I turn diffuse_weight to 0 for them anyway. I’ve tried both ways and saw no difference in my particular scene, so I’ve left those slots empty.

As a result, with that new network I’ve cut away 3rd of previous rendering time (92 secs with misss_fast_skin shaders and 58 secs through this new setup) and results are almost the same - right now there’s a slight deviation in bump in epidermis layer - through new network it’s slightly less sharp - don’t know the reason yet (and whether this is a problem or not at all ;))

The problem is that my test scene is not very good - I have only color map plugged into diffuse and epidermal and bump map plugged into all passes, so I hope people here will test it and comment on possible issues.

So, I’m attaching the scene with shading network set up for comparence - same data feeding pass system through misss_fast_skin shaders - buffer_skin - marked blue on screenshot and buffer_raw - through this new fast_shader technique - marked red. So just modify green data for your scene and compare speed and results of buffer_skin and buffer_raw.

Or can anyone suggest better solution?

#716

And here’s the scene (Maya 7.0, ctrl_buffers v1.4)

#717

Master Zap, the expression you have in your ApplyShader script to assign the lightmap to the material… Is no longer valid with Maya 7… It seams the Resolution vars have been changed, and it stays at 200 x 100 at any resolution…

Would you or anyone happen to know the Var.

#718

Yea, I was having problems in ver 7 as well. As a workaround for the time being…I imported a shader from ver 6 and it seems to work. I did have to adjust the algorithm scale a bunch for some reason. Anywho, worked on this guy…Maya MR 7 with displacement map.

#719

the variable to fix this in 7.0 is [size=2]defaultResolution.width instead of [/size]miDefaultFramebuffer.width. same goes for the height… you can either edit the expression per scene or go into the createandassign.mel and do a search for miDefaultFramebuffer and replace it with defaultResolution. then the next time you assign the material it will work! have fun!

#720

Hey thanks… great work guys btw.

What material do you guys use for the eye lens when lighting with IBL ?
I tried DGS. and worked fine until i added an area light.