New versions 2.4b are up!

#101

I’m just kidding and sneaking in a little commercial :smiley:

Yeah, I came up with a pretty crazy 2d plugin that does 3d rendering of depth images pretty much in realtime with direct and point lights with shadows (even soft shadows), environment illumination and reflection, full shading (where I figured out the ratio between glossiness, specularity and the light size), transparency with refraction and full on caustix projected in different ways (except on itself). Then Philipp (www.frischluft.com) joined in to take it to the next level in many ways…it’s absolutely crazy and already caused some noise around. It does way more than just that and besides “photoreal” like rendering it is also totally stunning for wicked NPR style rendering, normal image treatment and wicked effects. I’ve rendered the image that’s going to be in Expose 4 with it. The plugin is called “ZbornToy” and carefully tries to imply it’s use in connection with Zbrush. The alpha depth factor is lined up exactly! So you just type it in and on goes the show…totally fun, but also a really curious outlook for the future.
We’ve already been talking about taking the concept into messiah as well to do some surprising things, but since it’s right now priority to focus more on backtracking old issues and solving all of them to ramp up the animation section and fulfill some other age-old promisses (as you sure remember and gave up on…hehe…and we don’t and won’t as far as we can)…we have to put the ZbToy internalization a bit on the backburner.

No, man, I appreciated your joke…kinda cute. But it makes me seem that much more like a prima-donna…as if I could defend myself against that anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

No worries! :buttrock:

:beer:

Taron

#102

Show me something for fu*k sake! :bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce: I use Afx every day at work, and a lot of guys at my place ( www.filmtecknarna.se ) is doing major 3d comping in it.

#103

Cool, sounds interesting.

But well, yes, I am a strong supporter of implementing and fixing basics.
messiah can’t shine with dirty boots.
Messy basics have shied more people away than new fascinating toys can attract.

And just to get this out of the way hopefully: Yes, I have given up waiting for messiah to become what I once had high hopes it would: my main tool.

It doesn’t work for me and the stuff I’m doing for a living. I have XSI for that now, so I’m no longer under pressure. So yes, you lost me as a user.

But, I would be more than happy if you guys would get messiah into a state to make your users more satisfied - they earned that as well as you earned to get rid of all that beating and frustration.
I have a very clear picture what would be needed for me to reach that state. Most of it I repeated more often than anyone cared to hear it. Sorry for that.

We both know that we don’t differ that much in our perception of those things.
I’m just way more pragmatic and down to earth.

Cheers,

#104

HAHAHAHA, yeah, of course…I might post some links…gotta see, it’s a little out of place here. I’ve got some early funny tests on my blog… just go to my website and click on blog! :slight_smile:

#105

Eery, but true, I almost always did understand and agree with your requests and they were mostly completely adequate, which is why we’ve always tried to keep up with them as much as we could. I don’t know and don’t want to make any assumptions as to why we had such a hard time to follow up, particularely when I see alone what we’ve done from yesterday to today. Just as a little example: sliders now have min/max activated and working, autosave is now iterative with a choice for number of files and automatic deletion of files beyond the user defined amount and the funny issues you’ve appearantly mentioned in your thread are gone, too (viewport weirdness due to autosave: solved!)…oh, and the funny material copy and paste slip is fixed, too. That’s two days of our lives right now and we keep moving forward.
I still do like the idea of having you wait until we’re through with it all, because with all this intense work we’re really a little sensitive right now and the great feedback that we’re getting on the things we’ve already done is a real positive boost for us! It sounds so silly, but motivation is strength and that’s what we’re gaining with every positive reaction!

Anyway, I’m kinda happy about a lot of the things you’ve said there and want almost didn’t want to add anything to it…but this: :arteest:

Keep peeking into the threads and try it out every once in a while.

Taron

#106

Superb.
Solving those long time buggers may not be as fascinating but very rewarding in the end! :thumbsup:

I’m not negative by design, only if things stay static for too long I become annoyed and after that sarcastic - I’m sure you would react similar. 5 years for sliders min max are, well, long. :wink:
If you are finally going through messiah with a fine comb, getting rid of the dozens of little things that in the end make for an unearned bad user experience, I am very happy for YOU.
You will do yourself a lot of good with getting this old mud from your shoes :slight_smile:

I know exactly what you mean with motivation. I suffer from the same - in the other direction. I’m all willing to get things more positive once more. Your latest comments are a great step into that road.

If we know that you are going through those “little” things, I am sure everybody has something positive to offer that makes his work harder than it should be and that may be solvable without too much trouble.

I’m all for it! :thumbsup: :bounce: :bowdown: :wavey:

#107

How weired, man, your avatar is kind of genius! Reading your post makes it look like a friendlier smile suddenly. Bizarre! :eek:

Thanx, Thomas! :beer:

#108

Hehehe - yes, I know - he is like Mona Lisa :wink:

It is the only character I’ve ever done that is really worth it IMO. I have him on top of my invoices and people react extremely different to it - some find he looks very cruel, others think he is very feminine/androgyny (?) and sexy.
I find he looks very intense and sharply into the viewer…

Actually he helps getting paid LOL :wink:

Cheers,

#109

Great to see you guys moving in the right direction! I am personally VERY grateful for the help that Thomas has offered me in the past and so seeing part of PMG and him at odds has always made me feel uncomfortable! I still owe Thomas a large orange juice! :wink:

I think Thomas has made some very valid points (with force :smiley: ) AND I absolutely agree with the feeling that it is the smaller, less glamarous, things that can hold the software back…So, you can imagine my joy when I opened up 5.4 and saw that little yellow triangle changed! I do have a strong feeling that PMG are REALLY listening to us and removing the smaller blocks…

Guys - let’s stay on this track - I like it!

#110

I second that DMack, about Thomas and what he has done for the Messiah community. Now get back to work Thomas and finish TLHPro :slight_smile:

R

#111

:bounce:

Nice. It’s taken a while, but better late than never :stuck_out_tongue:

#112

Hahaha…we’re having a powwow! Beautiful! :wise: :cool:

#113

Since you guys are on a roll :), how about adding a popup message that allows you to abort a render that is using displacements on a mesh, but the mesh isn’t metanurbed ?

Either that, or have Messiah activate metanurbs at rendertime for any objects that have displacements activated. Saves sitting for ages ( unable to abort the render, wondering what’s going on… ) and hearing your hd trash the life out of itself, then M:S crashes.

#114

Hehehehe, that’s a funny one, and this time you really have to grinch a little in case you’re uncomfortable with really wicked things…but…too interrupt the precomputations (subdivision process)…double click a material sample so that it wants to render. This will trigger the interruption of the process and was currently the easiest way of implementing that (has something to do with thread and process access…a little wacky…everything else would slow down the render process as it seemed, so this is a temporary solution, nothing permanent). BECAUSE I’ve been upset about that same thing for a long time and a solution was at hand, depite it’s lack of orthodoxy, so to say! :stuck_out_tongue:

HahAAhh, see, how we take care of you! :smiley:

#115

Now that is a super weird one. :wip:

But great to hear it is possible. LOL

On another topic:
Taron or Thomas, do you think it would be possible for one of you to write a shader (Thomas or pmG) or an output buffer (pmG) that outputs motion vectors like the La maison shader for Mental Ray (http://www.alamaison.fr/3d/lm_2DMV/lm_2DMV_ref.htm)?
That would be a super great addition, because that makes it possible to get a nice and easy MotionBlur solution in post instead of cranking up the AA settings in Messiah to an insane amount to get smooth MB directly in rendering.

#116

Taron, how much effort is it, to implement submenus for the shader list?
Or as a first step - make the shader menu scrolling. :wink:

This will become a rather pressing problem for more people the minute I release TLHPro.

The Problem: Currently, if you have more shaders than fit on screen in one row, you simply can’t access them. I always have to remove certain shaders to access others.
There is a workaround with creating node presets and accessing shaders via the F5 palette, but that isn’t really fun…

The second problem with the current list is, that it becomes more and more confusing since the sorting isn’t especially logical (loading order I assume).

If you want to test it, install Tommys little Helpers from my website and AoN:Studio (you and Lyle still have those never-activated licenses, don’t you?) and your list should be full enough to see what I mean. :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for considering it.

Thomas

#117

I can confirm this one. As I am beta testing the TLHpro shaders right now and have the AON shaders and in addition to that even the old TLH shaders, it really becomes too crowded. The only way for me to add a TextureMap is if I click on a free channel in the attribute tab and assign it to an arbitrary channel and then reconnect it to the channel I’d like it to go to (because not all shader channels have these plus buttons to add more nodes).

That can get quickly annoying.

#118

Man, as I was reading these posts I was already getting ready to say: We’ve just talked about this one. Only to come to the next post that would trigger the exact same intro and yet another one…how funny.

First of all “gradient/light list funkiness” - solved

Second of all, the particle emitters have now better visual feedback (cone for cone, box for box, plane for plane, this sort of stuff).

Third, we’re looking into the node-overlapping stuff, because it might be a similar issue that helped solving the “f5 bottom window text overlapping” (thanx for that post, was a perfect hint to get us started!)

And now this:
I was just last week talking about the submenu thing for the shaders, because I realized that it simply gets insanely cluttered. Not to mention that the order appears completely random on first glance…and second…and even third…and I don’t even care what kind of order it is, it’s silly. SO, not sure what’s involved and how easy we can get it, but the issue of physically running out of screenspace makes it rather pressing! Perfect for bringing that up again! I wanted to get it all ordered in type of shader, but of course third party developers should have folders of their own going, which would be perfect! I’m just afraid it’s not the easiest thing and therefore not the fastest thing to implement! I could foresee a sort of temporary compromise by at least starting several columes based on screen coverage or so…gotta be some decent way for a quicker solution first.

BUT here’s may personal favorite request of the day (or week?):
Motionblur vector layer…hah! That’s fantastic, what a great idea. We’ve been talking about developing an internal method that works just like it, except it would have curved…oh…hmmm…I shouldn’t even really talk about that, but yeah… I love the simpicity of that one, should be fairly easy to write! I might even just make an AfterFX plugin that can use such layers then! Great, great, idea! I’m loving it! :love:
(yeah, yeah, but first things first, I know!) :blush:

#119

And - somewhere down the line - a tension map. This would make those wrinkle DeformMaps even crazier!
(info: http://www.claus-figuren.de/addons/tensionmap.php)

#120

Superb :thumbsup:

Even if the shader list would simply scroll if you move your mouse to the top or bottom of the screen it would help - this functionality is broken for that one list while it works for some others (expressions f.i. But this one would also benefit A LOT from submenus!, well, some other lists too). I personally was never too fond of those secondary scrollable window lists.

Curved vector layers would be very nice!
Oh, sorry I don’t tell anybody that you said Curved Vector Layers, OK? :wink:

Cheers and thanks!