What's new?

#1

Hey

Haven’t used EI in a while & was going to upgrade from V5 to the latest & greatest. My main interest is speed as I have a job comming up that requires very big models, huge texture maps, minutes of Animation & as always tight deadlines. I think Maya/mentalray will struggle & I don’t need to use any expensive lighting techniques to get this one done… just raw horsepower… so… how is the new OSX version on an intel quad?

How many million polys can EI render these days? (I did 8 million in V2.9 years ago)
How does it go displaying this information in the view ports?
What new GI features does EI have & are they any good for animation?
Will all my plugins need an upgrade too?
How well do EI & Maya work together?
Is this where the old EI crew hangs out now cause postforum seems dead!

Answers to these questions would be very appreciated. Thanks!

Cheers

Alex

#2

Hi Alex,

I’ll jump right in,

  1. I’ve rendered 30 million polys before, but with GI you will not be able to render more then 6-6.5 million before having RAM problems.
  2. OpenGL is much faster then it was in 5. MUCH faster.
  3. EI uses Monte-Carlo GI, it’s fine for animations if you have enough horsepower. I recently rendered a VERY complex town animation with GI. 12 Processors took about 3 days to render it (about 15 mins a frame).
  4. Yes (most updates are free)
  5. I have no experience in this area, but I do know that they are used together a lot.
  6. Yes it is, welcome and happy new merry! :slight_smile:

All the best,
Ian

#3

Hi Ian

That’s pretty cool… 30million polys!!! Roughly how long did that take & what system were you running? I’m guessing Camera can use more ram these days… the limit was 1gb last time I used it?
Monte-carlo… They scrapped their first GI solution if I remember correctly. So this one is usable for real work then :slight_smile: Good news! I take it there is no baking or re-using of GI solutions to speed things up yet? I’d probably stick with the good old Light dome for this job anyway, I got some nice results using that. I just wish that renderama could use calc once shadows… can it? I bought the lightrig plugin just before i moved to maya so I never got to use it haha. I hope I can still find all my information serial numbers etc.

I was tossing up between using renderman for Maya or using EI for this job. I believe EI will be faster than Rfm. Still, I’ll probably get Renderman anyway because I need another good renderer within Maya. All my modelling & setup will still be done in Maya so moving files to EI for rendering needs to be relatively smooth & painless.

Good to see your all still here :slight_smile:

Cheers

Alex

#4

Hey Alex!

Long time! What’s new on your side of the world?

I’ll take the last 2 questions

  1. Not much has changed on that front, it’s still a matter of translating to polys in Maya including getting rid of Trimmed Faces then running your model through OBJ2FACT. EITG has talked about more Maya integration coming in the near future but not with any detail at this point. I just got v7 but have not had time to play with it yet. It’s nice to see Camera with HDRI now.

  2. I guess we are here now, welcome back.

#5

Hey Alex

You can bring easily stuff from Maya using FBX.
Cameras can be exported from EIAS using .ma files or using the excelent “Free” Mocon 3.5.5 plug-in from Barry Berman.
It works on Maya, EIAS, After Effects CS3, Nuke…

more questions… msg me

Tomas Egger

#6

Hey Alex.

only to show a sample…
I did the diffuse pass using “Metalic” paint from Mental Ray.
all other passes using EIAS.
so, the cars and cameras matched perfectly.

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/gallery/image_full/234/

Thanksss

Tomas

#7

Tomas
Interesting mix, thanks for the tip.

#8

thanks Tomas as well for the tip.

if you have any more, EI to Maya or Maya to EI tips
Im sure a lot of us would love to hear them.

Scott

#9

Hey Guys

Just got my upgrade & I’m playing around with all the new bits & pieces while trying to remember all the command keys haha

Thanks for all the info. I’m sure I’ll have to ask some more questions at some point as it is quite clear to me that I have no idea what I’m doing… yet. Have to bring in some old projects & check my light setups. Illuminators not behaving for me right now. Apart from that I am quite enjoying the whole experience.

Thanks Tomas for your example. I have tested the FBX export from Maya using a simple camera motion a ground plane, cube, sphere & 2 lights with different colour/intensities/shadows. Worked quite well, Camera rendered out of EI with wrong aspect ratio but scaling it up in AE & overlaying it on the Maya render matched perfectly (shadows too, once turned on) so I am assuming there is a setting somewhere to fix it. Geometry was good once it was parked & re-imported but all textures had to be re-applied.

I used to own OBJ2FACT… Is there an upgrade or do you have to buy it again?

Cheers & Happy New Year

Alex

#10

Hi Alex,

Here are some tutorial links you might find helpful to re-familiarise yourself with it all…

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/support/tutorials (really beginners stuff this)
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/forums/viewthread/360/ (intro to EI PSD export)
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/forums/viewthread/355/ (7 other video tutorials)

All the best and happy new year!
Ian

#11

Hey Alex

I tried the FBX import on polys, polys with nGons, NURBS, lights and cameras and it worked great, thanks Tomas ;). The only issue I had is when I raised the tessellation on a NURBS object in Maya it came in to EI larger in scaled size, kinda odd. Seeing how well this worked maybe it’s no longer necessary use translate models with OBJ2FACT or Transporter.

#12

Hi Alex,

O2F is currently at 2.14. If you own V1 you need to upgrade. If you own 2 I could send you the latest update.

Jens

#13

Cool, nice that FBX translates Nurbs surfaces too… Gonna do some more testing tonight. Thanks for the video walkthough of the new layers system Ian… much better than reading the manual, just wait for the movie to come out ha:) Looks like it has been well implemented. Does it work for movies too? (damn I’m lazy)

Hi Jens, so it can be upgraded? how much is the upgrade… I am on version 1. Does it still handle mtl files & UV’s from Maya.

I am about to start on a job that has many large cad models & high res DEM scenery that has to look good… and render fast! Gonna start in Maya (mostly for modeling) but may need to switch over to EI for final rendering if things get too much… I have a feeling it will. Knowing how well EI handled 8 million polys on my old G4 leads me to believe it will handle this job nicely if converting everything isn’t too much of a pain.

I was also thinking about placer deposit to do some 2D trees… any experience/info on this use of the plugin is appreciated. I want to do quite a few to put it gently…

Cheers

Alex

#14

How many trees are you talking about?
Placer has worked well for me in conjunction with Arbaro. Placing hundreds of trees and grass clumps has worked fine. It’s easy to use and it’s been stable under EI 6.5, haven’t tried 7.0 yet.

#15

Hmmm… don’t know exactly. 10’s of thousands or whatever provides good enough cover for the scope of the shot (while being practical to render)… fly through/over of a 140km mountain range. Not sure what the limits are so I’m testing now in Maya. Can Dante handle this? Can’t remember off hand. A Max user tells me there is a plugin he uses that can handle 500,000 in one hit but renders a bit slow.

Cheers

Alex

#16

Dante doesn’t do instancing by itself. You’d need placer for that. I’ll take some time in the next couple of days to see if I can break Placer and let you know what I find.

I can tell you that redraw for animator is going to be slow with many thousands of objects (even instances) so it would be the last thing you want to put in when tweaking your scene.

#17

Placer can do hundreds of thousands of objects (I recently tested it with grass) - this is in V7 with the UB of Placer. Thankfully its one of the more stable NL products.

Ian

#18

Good news… 100’s of thousands!! I really don’t want to render this in MR even though it too can handle an impressive amount of trees because I want motion blur… i miss EI’s motion blur! Renderman may also be an option as it’s deep shadows look great on some basic tests but slower & I need to buy too many licences. Yeah I remember a few stability issues with NL plugs… last version i used of Pathfinder gave me all sorts of problems but Psunami always worked great. Waiting to hear back from Blair about my updates… is he away on holiday or something?

Cheers

Alex

#19

I haven’t seen Blair online for a few days, he has been away over Xmas, he might just not be back yet.

When I upgraded Placer recently it cost me $100 - just went through his online store - selected the upgrade option and got the code emailed.

Best,
Ian

#20

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.