Ok… check out this object. I wanted to create a series of pipes. Here we have one Scrim instance and 4 Trestle instances. The first or base Trestle instance is a polystar and there are 5 X-repeat copies. Its rotated into place on the X axis and positioned. The Trestle instance is then duplicated and moved up on the Y axis 3 more times. The top instance is scaled at the middle thus causing the pipes to bend. A total of 5 plugins are used. The connecting line should not exist because I want 5 freestanding pipes.
If we did this your way, there would be a Scrim Instance for each pipe, and 4 Trestle instances per pipe making a total of 20 plugins used. Each Scrim instance has to be placed by hand along with each Trestle instance.
Advantages of your method: Independant control of each Trestle Rib and each Scrim placement. Plus, no connecting line between pipes.
Disadvantages: 4 x more plugins used. More memory. Potentially slower performance.
Trestle should have the ability to create a single master polyline shape within the editor and place it into any kind of 2D grid with control over distance, rotation, and scale for each replicant within that instance of Trestle.
Joel’s sample is certainly an issue, however, I must interject and state that greater care would need to be used when placing and animating control ribs. Right now I can detect several places where the ribs are not properly aligned, misaligned or turned at too great of an angle from the previous rib thus causing geometry to overlap…especially for a loft. This is precisely why we need some kind of sweeping or path extruding capability over lofting for certain types of animation requirements.
As for the 0 or 180 shading angle…This is going to be tricky. We obviously need the ability to set the shading angle accordingly to harden or soften the resulting render, however, experience has shown me in Maya that when things start to flicker like this its due to the lack of geometric resolution and the normals wind up pointing in inappropriate directions to the camera. In our case, as geometry is being generated on the fly, its moving as a result of the changing control points. The user will need to be educated on when animating control ribs are better than saving out a Scrim model, reimporting it, and then skinning it to a set of bones for animation control. At this point geometry will be “locked” and wont change on the fly like it does now. Perhaps we can have a toggle to “lock” geometry so it will act more like an imported piece of geometry.
And as always, Encage helps the situation dramatically. Setting a sub-d level of 1 and 1 for both camera and animator along with a .1 smoothing radius nearly eliminated all traces of flickering except in those areas where control ribs were turned too sharply and geometry began to intersect itself.
Oh and Igors… changing to indices and smoothing angle to 180 certain does make a vast improvement, however, I also see that he’s combining uniform and adaptive geometry. Perhaps just a single type is better than combining when animating? I noticed good results by increasing the uniform resolution and removing adaptive resolution. (Since the control ribs were at the same number of control points) and I set my smoothing angle back to 60. Flickering was reduced nearly 95% (save areas of folding geometry)
And speaking of shading angles. Its interesting to note that when you extrude a Trestle Shape within Mrs. Bebel… you get absolutly no shading angle artifacts. Why is that? A scrim surface should be as clean as a Bebel extrude.
Hi guys,
Very cool plugin. If you don’t mind I’d like to suggest a couple workflow items. I’m not sure if these are possible but for a new guy, these would help a lot. Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if these are silly suggestions. :eek:
It’d be way cool if we could select a number of Trestle objects and while they are selected, have the option to click a button (or something) in scrim to add them to it’s “stack” in the order you selected. That seems like it would be a handy feature.
Inside of trestle, it would be cool if you could have a button to select adjacent points from the point you currently have selected. This would allow the user to quickly select a ring or expand their selections. Just a thought.
I’ve just got started with the plugins but I have to say, Trestle is pretty darn slick! I hope you don’t mind these suggestions/ideas. I know your working hard to add features.
#1: Great idea, unfortunately that is a “Host” requirement. The method of linking children to parents can either be done by dragging the child to the parent in the project window (multiple children are permitted) or select multiple children and click on the parent button in the project window and then select the appropriate scrim instance. I’m not sure if it will assign them in the order you select them or not. I will have to try.
#2: I like that idea. That’s a question for the programmers.
#3: The Star Tool will give you circles, however, I wouldn’t mind a few more presets too.
A true linear drawing tool where the user draws consecutive points to create a shape rather than adding points in a chain and then moving the points. I don’t want to get rid of the chain of points method, but the current method still seems so awkward and unnatural to “draw” with.
Multiple line segments or closed shapes rather than just one in a single Trestle instance.
True Holes & 2D “boolean” functions. (Proabably a v2 request)
Grid/array type functions that allow distance, scale, and rotation parameters for each consecutive replicant.
Methods to create sets of control points for set driven key type functions.
hi,
i just got home from some family visiting, nice to see the testing has started.
ok, lets start.
trestle:
first thing is just something visualy:
second, is there a way to break a closed shape up? if not, i suggest something like shift-backspace to delete a point with both attached edges.
scrim:
nice!
i have a project with only two trestle instances and scrim. if you close the path, garbage will be produced. i guess this is right, because there are only two splines. but rendering this will produce something complete different than whats in animator. it will also take much longer to render.
i have had 3 unreproducable crashes with close path.
there are also shading artifacts -> bad normals.
feature suggestion:
it would be nice if the tesselation settings would be accessible for XP. i guess this could make some nice LOD control. could also produce artifacts when animating.
The serious vertices normals bug is fixed (Brian, Joel). Additional details:
This sentence is too categorical and should be replaced with: “by Position” is less stable in animation
Calculating Vertices Normals is a heart of any model plug-in. Using of other ways (re-import, Encage etc.) is not disabled, but generally they are not able to produce such normals as original plug-in does, cause only the plug-in knows a way of model’s building, others - only “some polygons”. A plug-in can have or have not more or less features, but correct Vertices Normals is a thing that should be always and absolute. Don’t hesitate to report us about any related with it problem
Smooth Angle animation instability caused by changing of source polylines. We’ve no ideas how to solve this (same as how other apps solve this). Any constructive suggestions are welcome
Just made some fast tests this morning and found the Replicate function really cool in Tresle. Is there any chance that the Copy and Space number become animatable?
Thanks Brian and Igors for what you are trying to fill.
First off, thanks for all for your proposition/ideas, many of them are very interested/promised. Let us answer step by step and slowly, we think a discussion of 10 things in one letter is not what we need
Well, any replication theme always initializes more, more and more options. And it’s always hard to predict how usable they will be. Sorry, Brian, but up to now we see no valuable advantages of your “lofter array” idea (of course, we can mistake).
We’ve only one argument, however IMO it’s more important than all others together: INDEPENDANT CONTROL. Really, imagine we’ve a way to create 100 tubes by using only one instance of Scrim + Trestles in our prj. But… what user can do with these 100 result tubes? Nothing (or almost nothing) individual for each of them? Same material for all 100?
Also… standard operations scale, rotate etc. make very different results for “tubes block” and for “individual tube” (different centers, offsets etc.). In other words, if we need a 100 same tubes, then it’s a task of Placer Deposit. And if we want 100 different tubes, then it’s not clear how we can control their difference cause standard controls look not suitable to do this.
Add an “individual control” into Trestle? Hmm… it looks heavy and ineffective: “select an instance from list”, numerous problems with variable number of instances etc.
In any case we think it’s a good idea to implement first a Master/Slave feature in Trestle and see the problem above with new feature/experience.
There are many instances where creating a series of identical shapes in a row or grid can come in very handy, especially for Trestle. Is Placer Deposit a better solution? Absolutely. Nothing will out do Placer when it comes to uniform and random placement. That plugin is amazing. I only suggest providing grid/array type placements in order to keep overhead low from a plugin perspective, not to mention that every modeler I’ve ever used has some kind of step and repeat duplicate function. If Scrim is generating geometry that has UV coordinates, texturing objects shouldn’t be that much of an issue.
Secondly, lets think of other non-geometry creation circumstances where this could be used. Perhaps users would want to use an array of Trestle generated polygons to act as a particle emitter. If we had animation controls over their distances, rotation, and scales, very, very, very interesting surface emmissions could be produced with Trestle!
Did I say very interesting enough?
At least lets work to remove the connecting line from the current implentation.
You realize to that you could animate the shape of the stars over time by manipulating the control points… could be cool to see them morph into a different shape over time.
Perhaps it is just me but I have some troubles to visualize the horizontal half part of the grid in Trestle. A darker line (but thiner) as in the vertical part would be great.
