Paralumino Plugins v2

[Veehoy]

Trestle can save and load its own native polylines to disk, but nothing can read them except Trestle. Thus Trestle is an island. This limitation is what has to change in order for the product to truly take off.

Maybe a stupid question, but…wouldn´t a plugin for Illustrator that writes to this proprietary format do the trick? Or is this “Trestle” polyline file format to limited?

[ediris]

Yes that is what i meant could those lines work for extruding as well?

Aout the jumping in between frames i will say is the graphics card. i dunno but it looks very nice.

[Reuben5150]

Yes that is what i meant could those lines work for extruding as well?

Aout the jumping in between frames i will say is the graphics card. i dunno but it looks very nice.

Well, Swage only extrudes paths or lines, Mrs Bebel can extrude surfaces and polys.

[Vizfizz]

Maybe a stupid question, but…wouldn´t a plugin for Illustrator that writes to this proprietary format do the trick? Or is this “Trestle” polyline file format to limited?

I will certainly look into this possibility.

[Vizfizz]

Ok since Paralumino plug ins work with any path or group of lines , my question is can those lines be for example a simple logo. I imagine a simple logo could be traced with some animated geometry along its path(the logo) and be formed of several goups and then parent those bezier curves and lines to an exturder i donot rember which one is for extruding geometry inside Paralumino.
Is it possible?

Absolutely possible. Here’s a quick breakdown of capabilities:

Scrim: Lofts polyline/wires to form surfaces.
Swage: Extrudes polyline/wires along a path.
Revolver: Lathes polyline/wires around a central axis.
Braider: Analyzes geometry and creates polyline/wires that follow surface topology.
Trestle: Draws 2D polylines/wires that feed Scrim, Swage, and Revolver along with other 3rd party plugins.

Free plugins include:

Path2line: Converts an object motion path into a polyline for use with Scrim, Swage, and Revolver.
Wiremaker: Analyzes geometry and creates polyline/wires based of edges or polygons.
Runline: Included with Swage to cut up polylines into various user defined lengths.
Superlines: Creates shader based "false"geometry on wires at render time.

Konkeptoine Geometry Plugins that work well with Paralumino:

Mrs. Bebel: Extrudes surfaces with custom profile bevels. (Not path extrude)
Encage: Smoothes crude/rough geometry with SubDivision surface protocols.

[Vizfizz]

Rueben,

From what I saw in your example, you used Braider to analyze a model to create surface wires and then used them as a base path to extrude geometry along with Swage right? My guess is there might be overlapping areas of geometry that is causing the flickering.

Swage will extrude in realtime and it works pretty well…

[Vizfizz]

This is a simple example of animated extrusion in realtime. :

www.paralumino.com/CG_Talk/Swagetest.mov

www.paralumino.com/CG_Talk/Swagetest2b.mov

Here a simple wire was exported by EIM I believe and used as the extrusion path for the profile to follow. Everything here was being done in realtime in the EI camera window.

[Reuben5150]

Rueben,

From what I saw in your example, you used Braider to analyze a model to create surface wires and then used them as a base path to extrude geometry along with Swage right? My guess is there might be overlapping areas of geometry that is causing the flickering.

Swage will extrude in realtime and it works pretty well…

Hi Brian,

The setup was swage>runline>braider- i’ve still not rendered it out but i get the feeling it will still happen, anyway still trying out a few things… maybe i should read the manual

[richardjoly]

Another animated extrusion. The idea of the Hilbert cube was from the work of Stephan (sacenator) in the WIP section.

http://www.rdn.qc.ca/eias/Project_Hilbert2.mov

[AzOne]

Wow, Richard that’s amazing.
Please submit it to the EI gallery. So it’s all Swage?

[jimjam]

Possibilities…

Could Tesla conceivably save out wires and models in the Paralumino plugin format?

JimM

[richardjoly]

Thank you Aziz. Yes, it’s all Swage and sooooo easy to do…
The Hilbert path was made in FormZ and exported as DXF (polylines).
It is really rewarding to play with these tools because of the instant feedback of your alterations. Originally it was supposed to be only one round extrusion but it was so simple to do, I made three… And I regret not having the star shape rotating as it moves…
Very powerful toys.

[dieGolum]

Olé, Richard triple ex good example, excellent execution.

More More please:applause:

Cheers
Diego

[Vizfizz]

Possibilities…

Could Tesla conceivably save out wires and models in the Paralumino plugin format?

JimM

Hi Jim,

Right now EIM (and potentially Telsa) wires can be saved out as a FACT file that can be used as child entities for Revolver, Scrim, Swage, Runline and Superlines to work on. Unfortunately EIM wires can not be loaded directly into Trestle for CV point editing. This is another import capability I’d like to see after AI files are supported.

However right now the old EIM has a small bug in it in that exported EIM wires contain 64 CV points per segment. So in the simplest terms if you were to draw a straight line with just 2 points and export that wire out of EIM to Animator, the exported Fact model would possess 64 CV points along that line. That would produce a huge amount of geometry with any of our plugins. You can only imagine if you were to draw a more complicated shape in EIM…the exported wire would possess hundreds of CVs and the result would be a polygon nightmare in Animator.

Hopefully Tesla will allow for variable tesselation for exported wires. That will improve things dramatically for us. And if I can’t get the Igors to assist in creating v2 of Trestle, perhaps a tool can be added in Tesla to write out polylines in Trestle’s native point format. I don’t know yet.

[jimjam]

Thanks for clarifying, Brian.

I’m becoming more and more tempted by your Paralumino plugins, by the way.
The animations being shown in this thread are excellent advertisements.

Any update on when you’ll be able to share more about Tesla?

JimM

[bbuxton]

Inspired by this thread I have taken yet another good look at the offerings at Zaxwerks.

I really do like the way the ProAnimator package works - namely the quality of the text/ai extrusions and also the animation presets. The big let down is the rendering. I can’t see myself going for this without options to render elsewhere. Sadly there seems to be no way to get the animation out of ProAnimator & into EIAS or other 3D application. If only ProAnimator exported the animation, could this not be done via BVH?

BB

[futagoza]

Wouldn´t there ProModeler come in handy, instead of ProAnimator, to do the animating and rendering in EIAS?

Regards
Stefan

[bbuxton]

No the speed and simplicity of ProAnimator’s animation (presets) is appealing but not the rendering.
If animation paths could be exported then that would mean I could perhaps tweak animation in EIAS. Mostly I just want to render in EIAS - no way do I ever want to use Zaxwerks renderer, to my eyes it’s horrid and far too limited.

BB

edit: Getting 3D text/logos into EIAS is not a problem for me (I have good modeling tools, but I am not very good at motion graphics animation).

[ediris]

Hi Jim,

Right now EIM (and potentially Telsa) wires can be saved out as a FACT file that can be used as child entities for Revolver, Scrim, Swage, Runline and Superlines to work on. Unfortunately EIM wires can not be loaded directly into Trestle for CV point editing. This is another import capability I’d like to see after AI files are supported.

However right now the old EIM has a small bug in it in that exported EIM wires contain 64 CV points per segment. So in the simplest terms if you were to draw a straight line with just 2 points and export that wire out of EIM to Animator, the exported Fact model would possess 64 CV points along that line. That would produce a huge amount of geometry with any of our plugins. You can only imagine if you were to draw a more complicated shape in EIM…the exported wire would possess hundreds of CVs and the result would be a polygon nightmare in Animator.

Hopefully Tesla will allow for variable tesselation for exported wires. That will improve things dramatically for us. And if I can’t get the Igors to assist in creating v2 of Trestle, perhaps a tool can be added in Tesla to write out polylines in Trestle’s native point format. I don’t know yet.

1.Ok so will it be ¨easier to develop¨ a Tesla loader inside Trestle, for CV edit and animation than the famous .ai importer?

2. I guess what i was looking for is a combination of ASwage and MrsBevel so it could do an extrusion based on a path or polyline and at the same time rounded caps.That could be amazing for version2 of SWAGE or whatever you guys want.

[Vizfizz]

The need for wire import from Tesla into Trestle would at least give a certain amount of construction compatibility between applications for the purposes of animation. Its not much, but even the smallest amount would go a long way here.

As for Caps…well right now Swage can already construct rounded caps if that’s the way you want to draw them. Swage’s capping function is a bit different than most… I’ll agree. But it does work pretty well once you get the hang of it. I’ll admit that Bebel is more intuitive.