TLHPro - WIP Thread

#181

Thomas,

These are all beautiful and congratulations on your milestones!

Warmly,

Kelly

#182

Well done Thomas :thumbsup:

Phil

#183

Thank you guys! :bounce:

While today was not as productive as I would have liked since reality interfered, impersonated by a customer in a hurry, I got quite a lot covered anyway.

EasyGlass is done, although I realised while writing the docs that a real, physically correct fresnel algorithm would be a cool addition in later versions - right now it is just a fast fake in addition to the very handy switch between two refraction values for Incoming and Outgoing rays (to prevent the need to model two objects with inverted normals - which is the main advantage of EasyGlass).

EasyMath and RGBtoHSV/HSVtoRGB were rather fast to write since especially EasyMath needs some knowledge anyway that I can’t cover in the docs, so I didn’t even try :wink:
I look forward to hearing from you when it is released if you need more explanations or if you think it is cool the way it is.
Explaining what a Sine is and does and why the artist would want to use it is a bit outside my focus… :arteest: :rolleyes:

Then came TLHPro:Merger.
9 Pages with 62 images for all the 29 Merge Modes! Thanks god I did a lot of it last year already…

So now I am on Page 25 - not too bad for 4 days. :smiley: If I’m lucky, I can finish the docs tomorrow and then look after the content and the webshop on saturday.

The content will consist of just some example scenes first with more to come later.
Some of the nodes are so specific to the scene, that presets are hard to create - when objects are referenced like it is the case with several of the shaders, presets will give weird results.

If it would be okay with you, I think I would prefer to react to your questions and deliver tutorials and updated docs or examples on demand until a satisfying level is reached. Deal?

Good Night! :bowdown:

#184

:bounce: Excellent :bounce:

Couldn’t have timed it better ( I get 1 year closer to 40 in less than a week :stuck_out_tongue: )

#185

great work Thomas :thumbsup:

#186

It sounds great :thumbsup: , the idea to update stuff and questions as they come sounds great to. I´m sure that if you check these forums now and then you don´t need to cover every tiny bit since we all can ask you or anyone with more insight directly instead. A idea would be to make this thread a sticky after the release, Wegg?

#187

Great that you like the idea.
I would add everything that comes up over time to the docs and content, so it would be a user driven upgrading & improvement process. Sounds good to me :slight_smile:

Thank you for the feedback!

:bowdown:

#188

Isn’t the world of computers great? :banghead:

This morning I thought I could now uninstall my old InDesign 1.5
That was a bad idea, because after that, InDesign CS2 told me that it it missing some “System Fonts and Cmap Files” and refused to start.
Repair, uninstall/reinstall… nothing worked. Adobe support couldn’t help either but recommended another Repair/Uninstall/Reinstall cycle…
Half a day gone before I thought to look up what Cmap files actually are…

The first hit on Google brought up the solutions: One frigging font is missing and InDesign CS2 doesn’t start.
I was able to copy the font from my laptop and tadda everything is back to normal, but I lost half a day…

Joy :bounce: :rolleyes:

So I will most likely not finish the docs today, sorry.

Best regards,

#189

sigh if only pmg kept us updated like that…

#190

:wink:

I just found another problem in messiah: I have a 10x10 units groundplane and wanted to make it transparent at the edges with a distance shader in the opacity channel of the material to demonstrate some functions of TLHPro: RayType. But I kept getting visible edges:

To verify it isn’t the distance shader, I used an gradient to input plain zero 0.0 to the opacity, and still I can see the edges of the plane. Shouldn’t that be completely invisible? A difference between the pure background and the background with a 0% plane looks like this (I made it more extreme for better viewing):

This is the flow:

Then I looked through all the channels if there is some reflection going on, but nothing.

But then I noticed that the fresnel channel of the material showed a connection next to the input value in that connection thingy where normally a “+” should have been visible. It turned out, that a connection to opacity shows up not only on the shader tab behind the opacity field, but also at the fresnel field. But if I connect something to fresnel, this isn’t shown anywhere.

Since the stuff I see on my completely non-opaque plane looks like slight reflections, I wonder if fresnel gets activated by opacity inputs???

There also seems to be a problem related to threads, since the artifacts I see with a 0% opaque plane also show edges where two threads with 8 slices interleave and the errors are rather random.

Why am I unable to touch messiah without finding problems? Thanks god I’m in no hurry :beer:

Cheers,

#191

… and is anyone else getting this:

The text of the node behind is visible on top. Is that graphics card related? I use a GeForce 6800GT with drivers 81.98 and had no problems in the other apps I’m using…

Seems to be Bug Day today :twisted: Maybe I should call myself BUGs Bunny and wear long ears and a nice little fluffy ball on the behind?

Cheers :wavey:

#192

It doesn’t end:

When I render with a spotlight and Raytraced Soft Shadows with Antialiasing turned off for a fast preview, the rendering is extremely slow and messiah does absolutely perfectly smooth shadows. When I turn on AA, the first pass is fast and rough and the second pass is slower and smooth as expected
Can we have fast, rough, non AA shadows when we turn off AA please?

Cheers,

#193

me with a nVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 :sad:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=3209182&postcount=11
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=3408246&postcount=18
please Thomas let me know if you find a solution.

#194

I´m cool with the whatever Whildcat card I´m using at work, I´ll check my Nvidia when I get home…

#195

I think I had it for today:

I render my transparent plane in front of a background with a spherically mapped image:

To explain something about HDRIs in my docs I switch the background texture projection to Spherical (Probe), now I get this:

Why does the opacity on the object in the front change if I just use another projection type for the background image?

Argh… :banghead:

Sorry guys, I need some rest now - and I didn’t even finish the docs on RayType today… Everything I touched was just going BUG :shrug:
With that kind of luck, it will become some time next week for the release I fear. And now a new job has come in too - thanks god that will be done in XSI … :wink:

At least I’ll keep you updated!

:bowdown:

#196

The update of the day:

The good news first:
I was able to finish the docs on RayType today.

The bad news (at least for you):
That new job actually materialised and will keep me busy over the weekend at least, maybe longer. After yesterdays frustration, I’m actually happy to do something else for some days, even if I have to disappoint you guys.
I’m really sorry.
If anyone of you has a real pressing need (not just curiosity please) for the shaders, I could offer to do a “special emergency release”, like I did with Alex K some time ago for his panther.

I hope to be able to release next week, but like we all know, sometimes life decides otherwise.

I definitely will keep you posted :slight_smile:

Best regards! :bowdown:

#197

I´ll be waiting, thinking of more and more ways to use them shaders :smiley:

#198

Great AAAron :slight_smile: Thanks for your patience.

While writing the docs, I also found more and more ways of using TLHPro - nothing better than explaining something to get new ideas and applications.

I like writing docs a lot. It really clears the mind.
For example: With the Distance shader, I had problems explaining how it works, because I had two different approaches implemented “for flexibility”.
But in the end, it wasn’t very flexible but complicated.
If you try to explain something and find it overly hard to do, most of the time there is something wrong with the concept. :slight_smile:
This did lead me to removing some stuff and in the end, the shader is much better and easier to use now and even has got this extra button I showed above.

Today I squashed a bug in EasyGlass and DoubleSider with non-subdivided polygons and re-discovered that messiah deactivates refraction calculation completely when you set it to 1.0.
It only works properly if you set the air-surface to something like 1.00001 to keep the trigger from going off.
I think I will make this the default for the outgoing rays, so everyone is reminded of this behaviour when loading the shader.

And I finally found a use for Shadow rays with RayType: If you have Transmissive Shadows active for a transparent object, you can colourise or otherwise alter the surface the shadow is seeing - but it only seems to work for objects like a plane without a second surface to go through :

In the foreground, there are two simple polygon planes, standing upright with EasyGlass on them.
The left one has it’s normal pointing toward the camera and uses a Refraction of 2.5, the one on the right is rotated 180° around heading so we see the backside (normal pointing away from the camera). It uses the same material, but with the help of EasyGlass, it automatically has a Refraction of 1.00001. You can see that it doesn’t distort the view rays.
The sphere also uses the same material.

Now a RayType node connected to the material colour uses green for all rays but for shadows, which are made orange.
As you can see, it works for the planes, but not for the sphere. I assume that this is because the shadow rays go through the spheres front and back and become refraction rays by that (at least that is what I assume from my experiments).

This only works with transparent objects, since otherwise, messiah seems to be only checking if something is hit or not for faster rendering, without caring for the surface material - always using black for the shadows.

OK, I have to work on that illustration job now.

Best regards! :bowdown:

#199

Thanks for the update :drool: , the thing I like the most about the new shaders is that they fix stuff that annoyed me for a long time. BTW. your a master at explaining stuff! :bowdown: Can´t wait til the next update!

#200

Wow, that makes me very happy! Thank you! :bounce:

BTW. If you find something odd in my explanations, please let me know. I am german and have learnt english only at school 20 years ago and by internet-practise and reading lots of english books. So I am thankful for any pointers to stuff I use wrongly.
For instance: Do you use “toward an object” or “towards an object”? The latter sounds better to me, but I had other cases where the wrong thing did sound better to my german ear :wink:

Have a nice evening!