Again, I’m certainly no programer, but if someone’s working on a cloth plugin for EIAS, isn’t that just about as difficult as creating fur and hair? I mean Placer Deposit looks pretty good to me. Would a soft body simulator for EIAS make it possible to do hair too? – Kind of like taking what Placer Deposit does and making it flow?
Am I being naive here?
Thanks!
speaking of volumetric effects, one of the most useful additions to EIAS would be also some kind of volumetric instancing like this:
http://www.happy-digital.com/instance.asp
have a look at the samples.
this kind of plugin is very interesting because ‘natural looking’ scene elements (like grass, fur, pebbles, trees, rocks, clouds, ehm …even teapots!) could be rendered in enormous quantities without actually handling geometry. rendertime increase for scenes with millions of instances should be much less dramatic than with real geometry instancing.
i did and i’m actually doing some projects with landscaping elements like flowers, grass and trees. in such scenes, even with camera a limit when operating with real geometry is fast reached.
is there any hope? in theory, with the current SDK, is such a plugin possible? with shadows, transparencies and reflections?
cheers
markus
why can’t that kind of plugin be implemented? Problems with EI as a host? API limits? Could it be implemented if it wasn’t a plug but part of EIAS?
Thanks
Yes, here is the place where EI shader/plug is helpless without host’s support. We’ve experimented on this way several years ago. The attachments are our virtual grass attempts (hmm… looks naive a bit :rolleyes:). The render time is quite acceptable (no RT though), but instead we’ve had 2 serious problems that we could not solved.
Yes, without polygons we can fill unlimited areas with a grass. But we’ve lost a lot together with polygon/geometry limitations. And the material is the first and most painful. The shader should do all (absolute all) itself: color, texture, specular, bump etc. - no any side help cause all is linked to polygons we’ve not. There is no way in to force Camera to render a polygon “on fly” - the polygon should be passed to render engine and saved.
Also very unpleasant: AA (maybe same problem is also in plug-in that Markus posted a link). As you know, Camera shades edges very carefully - a several “sub-pixels” are mixed together to obtain a smooth result. But with our “virtual geometry” the render cannot detect where more or less sub-pixels required. So, jaggy grass edges :sad:
And, hmm… when we see a next such cool thing (as this LW plug-in), we usually do following: first we try to forget about it. Then (next day) we open demos/samples again and see them (and their render quality) whith calm emotions. It’s veeery helpful 
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