Public Beta: Trestle & Scrim

#1

Hello Everyone.

The Igors and I have proceeded forward to produce more geometry creation plugins for EIAS. Our cooperative effort to produce Mr. Revolver turned out rather nicely, so I’ve challenged the Igors to produce more.

Trestle and Scrim are two separate plugins which are being designed to help facilitate a plugin based modeling “family” for EIAS. That family so far includes the following plugins from Konkeptoine:

Mrs. Bebel: For simple extrudes and advanced beveling capabilities.
Mr. Revolver: For lathed symetrical objects.
Encage: Sub-d surface generation.

Our new plugins, Trestle and Scrim, are designed to supplment Konkeptoine’s offerings by introducing a new 2D drawing hub (Trestle) and a skinning engine (Scrim). We realize that without direct host support of modeling capabilities within EIAS, plugins will remain only a partial solution to the entire modeling requirement at best. However, we believe that plugin based modeling solutions offer the user some major enhancements to EIAS over traditional and simple .fact, .dxf or .obj imports.

Those advantages are:

  1. Rapid hard surface geometry construction
  2. Animation capabilities
  3. Guaranteed compatibility
  4. Convience
  5. Improved workflow
  6. Speed

Trestle will begin by providing the user a method to construct 2D drawing entities within EIAS. Similar to the graph editor in Mr. Revolver, Trestle will also provide methods to construct predefined 2D shapes, more advanced drawing tools, 2D point tracking for control point animation, and we plan to experiment with different forms of spline based drawing tools. The evolution of Trestle will take some time, and I will allow the Igors to expound upon the v1 offering of tools. However, Trestle’s end result will provide data that can be fed into Scrim for skinning and other geometry plugins that we have planned for the future.

Scrim is an adaptive geometry generation plugin. It is designed to scan its child entities (provided by Trestle, Path2Line or Revolver) and loft a surface between its children. Each independant child can be scaled, rotated or translated and the Scrim surface will be updated immediately. Scrim’s children can also possess their own deformation structure, thus modifying the loft with bends, twists, waves, and so forth. The results are quite impressive.

So… for those of you who haven’t signed up for being on the beta team… time is a wasting!

I also invite the entire EIAS community to participate the production of these plugins by particpating in discussion. Write down your ideas as you see things develop in this thread.

Thanks Again

#2

The following people have responded to act as beta testers for Trestle and Scrim by providing dongle and platform information:

Ian Waters
Uwe Kerpen
Stephane Crouzet
Brian S. (Sacslacker)

Beta kits will be distributed shortly.

Please private message me your email address where I can email the beta kits.

Alternates: (No info received)
Richard Joly
Joel Ruiz

#3

Trestle Beta 1 and Scrim Beta 3 has been seeded to the beta team.

Joel Ruiz
Ian Waters
Uwe Kerpen

Stephane Crouzet: Email address required. Please send private message.
Brian S. (Sacslacker): Email address required. Please send private message.

#4

Here are a couple of quick snapshots of the interface so far. Trestle is still very preliminary.

#5

I spent a few minutes this morning familiarising myself with trestle and I like what I see. The ‘Edit UVs’ button has me intrigued!

The ‘replicate’ feature is very cool, It would be great if you could offset rotation as well as distance though, so you could have a series of particle lines on a curve.

And out of curiosity, is it theoretically possible to do the exact reverse of Path2Line? By this I mean can you create a motion path from a particle line?..

Just curious,
Ian

#6

Hi, Ian

  1. There is nothing intrigued in UV (under construction now). That’s absolute standard UV usage: fix topology for animated graphs, similar as a texture is fixed for deformed objects.

  2. Replicate feature (proposed by Brian) looked very modest first. But after some playing/experimenting we’ve found this simple theme definitely interested, the problem is only this feature eats a lot of time (that other features need too) :slight_smile:

  3. A plug-in cannot set desired animation channels interpolation, but plug-in can create/delete keyframes (same as fill frames with data). But, of course, Trestle isn’t designed to do so.

#7

The biggest issue I see with Replicate is any other option other than Z series creates a connecting line between the second and all consecutive replicants. Big problem when skinning between two or more sets of these.

#8

Hi, Brian

Yes, something “not Z-series” is not very suitable as a Scrim’s input. But there are other applications

#9

So… are you telling us that its not possible to remove the connecting line? I understand that when Trestle generates replicants of a polyline shape, the resulting objects are going to be seen by EIAS as a single group. Thats fine for this purpose and I think scale and rotate functions for replication should be implemented. If users want independant objects to individually animate, they will have to use separate non replicant Trestle instances. However, if people activate the replicate function, whether in Repeat/Mirror X or Y, the resulting shapes have to be free standing and not connected by a poly line. Its ok that they are a single group. The whole point of providing replicate functions is to permit skinning between replicant groups.

#10

wow, these plugins are really exciting… I can see the animation possibilities, very cool.

I’m getting some shading artifacts. I made some Trestle polylines and lofted with Scrim, but the resulting body doesn’t look right. I’m playing with the shading angle and the steps, but I can’t get it to look right. Here’s a render and a screenshot:

Joel

#11

Hi, Joel

Set “Smooth Angle” = 180. If it doesn’t help, then archive this prj and send to us. Thx

#12

Hi, Brian

All other repeats (except Z-series) are designed to produce a single (but complex) polyline from basic graph. Thus there is a connection line. Otherwise we need another replication modes: X(Y) series. But… we really see no their usability. If a series of closed polylines are in same plane, then… what rational surface can be created between them?

#13

So, if I want hard edges, I will get artifacts? I mean, it only renders fine (well, alomst :wink: ) with a smoothing angle of 180, but if I set it low in order to get hard edges, I also get artifacts…

Jo

#14

Hey Igors,

This is the problem I pointed out to you previously. Surfaces with a decent amount of curvature render out “ok”, but the flatter the surface and lower the surface angle, the more artifacting and black spots appear. We should be able to make the surface appear faceted and clean without strange shading occurring.

The immediate fix is to export the resulting model and reimport the results via transporter and have it reset the shading angle. That usually gets rid of the artifacting look for me. However, this of course defeats the overall purpose of the plugin.

Another thing I’ve noticed is Encage will improve the shading problems. But again… not the “right” answer.

#15

Exactly Brian, we need to have it shade correctly at low smoothing angles. If it doesn’t, the usability will be severely limited for these great plugins.

J

#16

Hi, Brian and Joel

Absolute not right. We need a project with artifacts

Project please

#17

Since EIAS does not permit plugins to generate multiple independant entities other than nulls, lights, and cameras…and the resulting polylines are grouped into a single object, the user is forced to create multiple Trestle and Scrim instances in order to create any kind of array of surfaces. (Examples of surface arrays: Wooden Planks, house siding, rafters, slats, bolts, pop rivets, or any other kind of repetitive structure)

However, if we can allow Trestle to create 2D arrays of closed polyline shapes, that all exist within the same 2D plane, the user can simply duplicate that single Trestle instance, move it up or down off that plane, and Scrim a surface between the two arrays. Great for architectural purposes and we don’t get tons of duplicated Trestle and Scrim hierarchies.

When you connect the closed polyline you create an arbitary surface when you scrim two Trestle arrays together. That connecting polyline has to go… and more 2D repeat functions are required.

I will send up some samples tonight.

#18

A couple of animations showing some artifacts:

http://www.worx3d.com/forumpost/r1.mov (500k)
http://www.worx3d.com/forumpost/r2.mov (500k)

the project file:

http://www.worx3d.com/forumpost/Project2.prj.zip

cheers

Joel

#19

Hi, Brian

We caught your idea. Ok, let’s add X-series and Y-series in Trestle beta 2. However, “loft array” would not work as you write. Example: there are 2 Scrim’s children, the first contains polylines 1, 2, 3 and the second 4, 5, 6. The Scrim adds all 6 polylines, but in sequence 1-2-3-4-5-6 (not in 1-4, 2-5, 3-6). So, additional options are required. We’ve nothing against this potential feature, but how it’s usable - that’s we don’t know. Hmm… if 1==2==3 and 4==5==6, then it’s definitely simpler to re-import Scrim’s output and duplicate it twice. At least it would be rendered faster. Your arguments?

#20

Hi, Joel

Thx, d/loaded.

  1. Animation: “by Position” practically has no chances to be stable in animation. Use “by Indices” that’s often suitable for polylines with same number of points (as in your prj). Another solution (“by UVs”) coming soon

  2. Junk vertices normals - we see it, need time to fix

  3. We see another one problem after we rendered your prj. The “Smooth Angle” is not suitable for animation. In your prj: a some point can correspond to “acute angle” in one polyline and to “obtuse angle” in next polyline. If polyline point’s are animated, then the angle is also changed. So, now 0 and 180 are only values of “Smooth Angles” that give stable shading in animation.
    So, what are ideas/suggestions how to solve this problem?