my experience with messiah (tell us yours as well)

#1

i just finished a very tight deadline project with messiah, actually this was my first messiah project. I had alot of objects, i mean alot i think scene went up to million triangles (there were not million characters, only one character model with alot alot of objects) . Rigging and setup was easy, animating (mainly 4 sec run cycle with some stops and listening kind of behaviour) was fast at least the first passes (And i did not have time to go to real inbetweens, due to lack of time. The animation went to compositing with extremes and this was not messiah`s fault at all, ad agency dragged our feet forever). Rendering was quite fast (No motion blur was used, even thou i wanted moblur but that would increase render times alot). So during this project messiah prove itself as production ready tool to me.

But i also realised that somethings need to be finetuned. I think that once this tuning is done in messiah, it will be the best and easiest solution to tight deadline and tight budget projects, or for more.

I was quite happy to use messiah in this project. Modelling was done in modo, rendering animation done in messiah. .Lwo from modo to messiah was just fine, surfaces and textures went ok. But it seems like messiah could not assign proper textures if 2 different objects shared same named uv space (things like mirrored objects). That was the main problem during the production. I solved it by deleting those objects in modo, and actually duplicating them in messiah again. Then everything went fine. I nailed down render times to 20-40 secs per frame with 3 -4 lights with cast shadows. I thought that was pretty good. I also had one feet flipping problem, i actually could not nail it down. But i solved it by turning h and b channels to static channel. It is not a solution solution but it did the job for given project.

Render groups saved my butt when i needed to create shadow passes. But during this phase i realised that things like “unseen by camera, cast shadow etc” should be at surface level not object level. Because one object may contain multiple surfaces easily. So that is the first thing i ask about rendering improment.

We also had Ptrack camera motion matching data, we exported that data as .lws scene file from pftrack. And again we imported lws camera scene file without any problem. This was a really good relief. And sequenced backround images (from live shots) were very helpful and responsive in messiah.

Overall that was my experience with messiah in my first messiah project. And all my big stars go to messiah because i did not pass my given deadline due to possible technical problems.

So from my own experience in a real production the things needed to make the the production faster.

rendering

-Object render properties like “cast-receive shadow, unseen by camera etc” should be surface level

-Render groups should be able to carry those object render properties above. So it would be easy to turn things on and off. This is ok when you have 2 objects but it is not fun when you have 10s of objects

-multiple objects sharing same named uv space should be fixed

-I think that this was my biggest obstacle in the project. When you load .lwo object into messiah, messiah never reads the surface settings from the original object again. For example if i change the object in modo add new surfaces etc, messiah never reads them. I understand that messiah actually writes surfaces and materials to .fxs once object is loaded, but this feel little counter productive, because i really got at least 15 model revisions and everytime, i needed to reassign bones and rest, which was not fun. I am not asking messiah to change the way surfaces work, but maybe someone can write a script that can just reload .lwo surfaces and overwrites the messiah surfaces when needed.(i actually had 200+ surfaces materials in this scene. And this is possibly more than anyone else had in messiah.) So this way modelling, rigging, animation etc can go along without stops like these.

animation
-I think gimballock issue should be solved because workarounds add too much on setup times, or brings limitations. Quaternions is fine but it is pain in the butt to really look at motion graph. At least there should be another setting that can overwrite these settings so it should be easy to turn on and off on multiple objects

-we should be able to assign shortcuts to individual group names, that would make easy to cycle through different parts of the objects or bones.

-We really need classic selection or selection needs to be improved in 3d view. Because when you have edit sphere blocking most of the objects it is not possible to select objects or bones.

-ability to drop selection

Again messiah saved me in this project (alonside modo , i do not know if any other sofware could have done the job this fast and efficient. So i thought that i should give the impression of real production so people can actually see how powerful messiah is. This was a one man project(PAL, 25 fps) pretty much, modelling, surfacing, setup, animation, camera and light setup (Wegg helped me out with 3 out of 9 lighting shots) and rendering with a very tight deadline (close to 2 weeks). I think i rendered close to 900 pal frames.

#2

Heh, I’m still working out my project but after long years of doing this I find that there’s always technical issues no matter how great or expensive your given wares are. I think I’m however being superflous as most messiah users I interact with understand this.

Gimbal lock issues, I think that may be in your rigging. I used to have those issues but I was rigging in an “out-dated” way. When I finally revamped my style I found all of my rigging issues were taken care of. I just had to rethink the way I did things. This also holds true for the selection process. I use armatures. Using armatures allows me to assign x,y,z to left,mid,right mouse buttons and the same h,p,b. I don’t even worry about the selection process much. If things get very complicated then I simply create a little man of an object on the screen somewhere using armatures. I do this rarely as it does not feel natural. Mostly however I just use object positions and go from there. I guess where the edit sphere can get annoying is when objects are close together especially when coordinate tags are overlapping the object/armature you want to select. It’s nothing to select a remote object and then select the one I want and you’re right, it is an annoyance but a very minor one for me.

As for rendering, I still render in LW. It’s a good renderer albeit slow. Still there isn’t a decent cel-shader and edge tracer out for Messiah than can compare to Unreal Cel and Edge so I’m stuck. By using MDscan I can still take advantage of multiple nodes and use my render garden.

Over-all I’m very happy with Messiah as well as the company. They went the extra mile for me when I was having problems and that is something I’ll never forget. Not many companies will do that unless you’re a large studio with big names and big money. They defied one of the many things I hate about the 3D industry, They treated a no-one like me as a valued user.

#3

Man Jonathan. . . I almost cried a little bit reading that. My experience with using Messiah and in working with pmG has always been positive. There are ALWAYS little things that trip me up with any project using any program. Its how fast you can pick yourself back up from that fall that sets messiah appart from the rest. pmG haven’t let me down yet. I feel like a “Big guy” even though I know my place in the world. :slight_smile:

#4

My experience with messiah hasn’t been vast but so far has been good (with some small exceptions).

The last big thing I did was in the 3rd quarter of Animation Mentor. I was a wee burnt out on Maya and wanted to try my hand again at messiah. So about 2 days before my assignment was due I decided to convert the AM character Bishop over to messiah to do some small tests. Within 3 hours I had him fully rigged with more control then the Maya version (side note, the 3rd quarter Bishop is lacking full facial controls so it was mostly body with basic eyebrow and mouth controls). Needless to say I was surprised and thought, what the heck, lets redo the assignment in messiah this weekend and see how it goes. To say animating in messiah was quicker for me was an understatement. It had been awhile since I had had that much fun animating. Unfortunately I had to sell my copy so I wasn’t able to finish the assignment up with full facial control but I was left with a feeling that when I had a chance I would get messiah again and try it out on a more ambitious project.

Sooooo, I am now working on my short film for my final quarter of Animation Mentor and will be doing it in messiah. I did my layout in Maya due to time constraints but since I have 4 weeks before next quarters first assignment is due I will be spending the break bringing over all my assets to messiah and doing as many little animation tests as I can. Once that starts I will definitely post it up as a thread here. I really can not wait to do it.

Great thread BTW. Seeing this list come alive the last few weeks has been inspiring!

#5

Nice thread, but it would be even better if u actually post some reference of your work so that everybody can see it, that would be cool!

#6

Well the work has not been broadcasted yet, and i do not hold the copyright on it, so if i can get the permission i can try getting some screenshots.

k

#7

Hi Jonathan,
thank you for great response.

What i was trying to say is that sure there is a hack for everything under the sun, but not everyone is capable of instant hacking. Maybe you or someone else can do those things in seconds, but that may not be the case for everyone else. I would like to give you a simple example, i heard that when they design airports, they try to design it for lowest iq people, so if they can figure out how to go from one place to another, everybody can. Since i have lightwave background, i know how those hacks work, but for people who come from different backgrounds, they may look rather strange. And asking them to change they way they do things radically could be just too much. I like that i can find work arounds, but that should not be the only way of doing things in my personal opinion. So good mix of both should be the solution. Although, most of the other softwares have similar issues, and people find creative ways to take care of those issue, but messiah can take the solution one step further in my opinion.

So for selections, that is what i am doing too, just creating armatures for important things (which is one the best things about messiah that other softwares do not have). But again, we should have drag selection, lasso selection etc. Messiah selection works great, if you select left arm and then select right arm, but not so great if you select left hand and then left thumb, because edit sphere could be on your way. My solution is to press esc to disable and select and press esc to enable it again. It is just too much of time to select one thing, i just think that this is overlooked, not a critic just a suggestion. Lets put it this way, if i spend 3 seconds per selection, during a project one may select things 1000 times at least, so it makes 3000 seconds/=50 minutes. It is not a small number, while it can be done in %10 of that time.

On the other hand, these are not great obstacles at all because during my tight project time they were not the major things, and they are just little suggestions. Actually things like ad agency or customer were the biggest obstacles to finish the project :applause:

#8

You’re right, should be an option…
My method is to select one item, like the hand. This will also activate that item on the item list, which I then use to shift-select the other items I want. I
Sounds tedious, and it is if you have loads of items there… but its very fast if you do the following:

  • make groups (ie. anim1, anim2, animALL)
  • activate the “filter hidden items list” (rmb over world-view)
  • change the drop down bar at the top of the item list to one of those groups. You’ll only have your animation objects.

edit:
What might also be cool is if you move up and down the hierarchy (arrow up, down) holding shift, to toggle add selection… hmmm…

Have to switch back to “all items” to drag-and-drop parent etc, but this is very handy for cleaning up the interface…

#9

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