Cool things no one knows about EIAS

#1

To apply the same property to multiple elements, you can right-click on any pop-up menu and you’ll see a whole lot of ways of doing just that. The most useful one is probably “all selected”.

#2

With it being that time of the year, my first is an Easter egg:

Hold down Alt (option on American Macs) and click on the Plugin menu, you can bring up an ‘About xyzplugin…’ box that tells you a little about the plug-in.

WARNING: Save your project before you do this, Ramjac plug-ins simply crash EI when you click on them.

Ian

#3

This has been mentioned elsewhere, but…

Set Anti-Aliasing to Adaptive and min 255, max 255 to put camera into “average” mode.
This creates a crisper image, good for stills. Also renders just a bit faster.

#4

To create a null that has exactly the same position and size as “object A”, go to Object > Add Null, and click on “object A” in the Project window.

#5
  • Attach your model to a null that has the same size and position (see previous post)
  • Set the model is to only inherit deformations and nothing else
  • Apply some deformations to the null, the model should inherit it.

You now can move the null around as a deformation area completely separate from the model.

#6

You can click and hold on a color chip and drag it over another color chip to change it. This makes it easy to copy a diffuse color onto a reflection color.

SH

#7

This should read “Adaptive” mode.

#8

Yes, the anti-aliasing setting is “Adaptive” vs. Oversample
But look at the Camera window while rendering… next to the antialiasing item it will say “Average”.

#9

You can do replacement animation, where a different model appears on each frame, through “group cycling”.

This requires creating a model for each frame of the sequence and importing them - in order - into Animator. All of the models are then Parented to the very first model in the list. The Parent model then has two tilde’s added to it’s name (i.e. ~~Model).

During rendering the Parent model never appears, instead, the first child is rendered on the first frame, the second for the second frame and so on.

#10

This is a great trick that also has GUI controls.
There is now a tab in a group’s info window to control child cycling.
This includes start and stop frames, and frame rate and “loop” controls.

(This trick reminds me of the secret $cloud$ shader from v2.7- anybody remember the specifics on these? Are they still active? (even though no longer neccesary).

#11

Sometimes you try all your might to grab the Bezier handle of a keyframe but can only get the translation arrows. Clic anywhere beside the point, the handles are still there but the translation arrows are out of the way. Do your thing…

#12

Hi, gentlemen

Last 2 days we’ve been busy with learning how EI scales a plug-in with chidren. Finally it’s clear , so let us story what we’ve learned, and, of course, sorry if we “rediscovered a bicyrcle” :slight_smile: At least it’s a new for us.

Ok, steps:

  • create a simplest cube with Ubershape (resolution = 1)
  • add MrBlobby to prj, set “vertex blobs” and link the Cube to it

Now you see 8 balls (for each cube’s corner). Let’s start experiments with “Inherit scale” = OFF for children.

  • save MrBlobby as a model, re-import it and try to scale. All goes fine, scale works in absolute standard and intuitive way. BTW: same results are with “Live plug-in” = OFF

  • try same scales with MrBlobby plug-in (Group Window). Ops! Absolute different results! We see our balls are enlarged/reduced correspondly, but distances between them remain the same.

We’ve learned how it works. If plug-in’s scale = 2 (for example), then EI passes to the plug-in the children data scaled to 0.5 (and vice versa, children are enlarged twice if scale = 0.5). A plug-in reads children and creates a geometry. EI scales the plug-in’s output. Final result: previously reduced/enlarged source data take their original places (cube’s corners in our test), but plug-ins results are scaled (balls)

Hmmm… interesting solution, but … suitable not for all plug-ins :hmm:

Ok, now set “Inherit scale” = ON for child groups. For our example it works as a “standard” scale. But it’s not so if a plug-in has 2 or more chidren, cause each child uses its local center to scale.

There are a lot of scales in EI :slight_smile:

#13

You can preview motion blur and DoF within Animator, no need to do a test render!

  1. Select the world view window
  2. Render > Preview Blur Window

Just make sure you have multi-frame set to more then one frame and that your preview is set to output to screen (thats the default anyway).

Ian

#14

This tip was given on the Postforum by Charles Berg (Cj)
It shows how you can reposition groups by dragging over the icon or make it a child by dragging over the title. Easier to show:
http://www.rdn.qc.ca/EIAS/Project_window_order.mov

#15

This tip was given by Halfworld on the Electricimage Forum.

#16

The project window has far more ways to be organised then some people realise. Have a look at the little icons at the top of the project window. Specially the first and the fifth give you a lot of options. Too many to sum up here, just explore them.
One of my favourites is to colour label the elements in a complex rig that will animate and switch to “view by label”. That way you don’t see the parts of the rig that you don’t animate and everything appears in a listed way which takes up much less screen space.

#17

grrr…need to figure out why this doesn’t work in OpenGL. And perhaps add full-window cross-hairs.

#18

I love this one, the most useful to me has to be ‘complexity’ which lists objects in order of polygon count. I use it often.

#19

Here’s another one.

You can render your animations backwards if need be, we’ve had to do this a few times but I keep forgetting it’s even an option, hopefully this will immortalise it in my mind :slight_smile:

In the render window > click timing > render: range of frames (drop down) > hit reverse.

!!
Ian

#20

Next up

You can colour cameras, I usually colour them so they match their colour label in the project window.

In general I use three labels for cameras: Possible viewpoints, Confirmed viewpoints, Render cameras (render cameras being free roaming cameras for diagnostic purposes viz. not animated or in a viewpoint position).

Take a look at the attachments,
Ian