Yowza!!!
This is cool work Thomas. It’s been a while since I’ve done any 3d stuff in my spare time (just had to take a break away from my computer 
) but both this thread and Tarons have inspired me to wipe the dust off my monitor and get going again 
Hi Wes - now this is some good news
It makes me proud to be able to give inspiration to guys like you who work on cool projects every day :bounce:
messiah:studio starts to give me really terrific results here while being much easier to use than Mental Ray. Tarons project and the next patch hopefully are the break point where messiah no longer has to stay shy in the background but hits the main stage
I’m looking forward to your results and ideas!
Cheers, :bowdown:
hehehe - no, TLHPro is a separate commercial product.
I would really love to make all this stuff free, but I have to pay my rent… :shrug:
There will most definitely be a bundle with AoN for new customers and a reduced price for existing AoN users - but I haven’t decided on the price yet since I still add tools. I will try to keep it cheaper than AoN:studio though.
AoN 1.1 is planed and will be free for existing customers but I don’t know when it will happen. In fact, I still hope to get some feedback and feature requests from users (that fit into the topic of procedurals) or requests for additional structures and patterns to guide me. I want to make the stuff that people really want and need and not just throw out things to make the list longer.
I personally always preferred a smaller set of very good and flexible procedurals over a set of 200 where you only use 5 since the others are too similar or rather useless in reality…
Quality over quantity is my goal.
Things already on my list for AoN 1.1 are reset-buttons for the parameters (if you get lost), vector noise & turbulence (every color channel is independent) and some additional patterns. I also work on a special noise that is different from the old perlin noise, but this is in very early development and much harder to do as one may think…
Cheers!
features for AoN… mm let me think … does AoN have some non organic looking stuff?
like nurniers or panels with controlable rust and dirt???
is that even possible??
.
Antonio
Parsec3d:
Yes, that is possible. I never used stuff like that in my own work though (I’m not much of a spaceship guy ). I will look into it.
I also thought that fishlike scales could be useful - maybe a variety of some organic and some more technical scales (roof tiles etc.)
Keep 'em comming
Cheers,
[font=Verdana][color=white]I’d like to see the possibility of being able to take a snapshot of my current shader set-up, and a toon shader.
[color=white]And by the way how do I look through different cameras? [/color]
R[/color][/font]
I think I’m unsure what you mean:
You can save complete materials, single nodes or branches already. For materials, rightclick on a material in the material tray and select “Save Material”. If you save it in the correct directories, you will see it later in your “F5” palette under “Materials”. You can also make a copy of your material at any time as a backup by rightclicking on it and choose “Copy Material” (I do that quite often when experimenting).
For single nodes or branches, rightclick on the node in the shaderflow and select “Store Shadernode”. If the node has incoming connections, the whole branch will be saved, if not, only the current node will be available after saving as a preset in the palette under “ShaderNodes”.
Another tip is, that if you rightclick on a node and select “Copy Shader” or “Copy Shader Network” you can not only paste it wherever you want, but also a real copy of that will be saved as a temporary material in your messiah temp directory, from where you can move it to the ShaderNode directories or paste it into another running messiah instance with a different scene loaded - “Quick transfer”…
But I am still not sure what you mean with “snapshot”? If you mean you want to bake the surface into a texture map, it is my impression that this is impossible with the current SDK, so pmG would have to implement that. I would love to have that option too
Toon shading is already possible very easily with the gradient, see the following thread:
Line rendering is a bit limited with that option and I have looked into different options for that - I’m still a bit lost in the messiah SDK regarding image filters…
The examples aren’t really using the image data and the explanations are almost NIL
Your last question is definitely not related to my work but extremely simple: Rightclick on any camera in the list to make it the current camera - the eye icon will change to an open eye.
There is also an expression to set the current camera, so you can even see your camera switches on playback in the viewport…
I am unsure if this is was you asked for - if not, please explain a bit more what you want to do
Cheers!
I’ll post a detailed explanation tommorrow about “snapshot of my current shader set-up” as it’s late here
Wow fish scales … that would be very very cool for dragons and aliens … mmm how about small featers ?..
but ,, really ,, you have no idea how usefull are procedural panels for spaceships and airplanes, but extremly problematic at times in lw for the simply fact that you can't make them use an uv,, as I just saw in your chains example ,,, I'm amazed :) ..
Cheers!!
Antonio.
OK, todays shader is TLHPro:Merger.
While messiah provides basic merging directly within each connection with the connection-modes (=±*/<>) and comes with a merger node with the same basic options, this leaves quite a lot to be desired for more complex material interaction.
So I implemented an advanced Merger node that has 28 different layermodes (most of them similar to Photoshop and other such software) and also comes with an experimental HSV mode where the HSV color model is used instead of RGB for merging (Not always usable but often very interesting results ).
And here is an example:
Image 1 is the scene rendered with one material that uses a thickness based gradient:
Image 2 shows the same scene but with a second material that has transparency and refraction:
Image 3 finally shows those two materials merged in messiah with TLHPro:Merger into one with the “Overlay” mode:
With the click of one button you can swap foreground and background layer to get a different result:
…or go surrealistic with the HSV mode:
… and this was just the Overlay mode, one of 28 available layer modes (and one of my all time favorites BTW.)
Cheers! :bowdown:
Ok, people are going to hate me, but for what this does, I think it should be about the same price. This is amazing stuff going on here. The fact that this can be done fairly easily (from the way you make it sound) says a lot for the way Messiah was put together. Excellent stuff! BTW, it’s probably a good thing that this will not be available until after Christmas or someone would probably be missing out on a Christmas presant so I could buy TLH Pro for myself. 
We seem to be on the same page here. I’m really looking forward to this release. Unfortunately I seem to be spending all my time with surfacing my models and no time learning how to actually animate in messiah.:eek:
hi Thomas,
Nice work, you make me really want to play with messiah …Unfortunatly I have no time or energy at the moment.
I have a request for you ( not sure if its really related ). It would be cool to have something like FI local ambient or better some sort of ambient only light but with fallof ( Like you have in max : http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/smoke3d/tutorial10.asp
http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/smoke3d/tutorial3.asp ).
Hi Thomas, TLHPro is looking more and more impressive.
As far as the wishlist for AoN 1.1 is concerned, i also could imagine some more non-organic patterns, e.g. stars ore honeycombs.
Another thing that I am missing is a shader for anisotropic reflections (like in brushed metals), or can this already be done ?
Parsec3D:
Yes, I am also very excited with the possibilities that UVmapping for procedurals brings to the user.
And not only that, you can as well use spherical, cubic and any other mapping messiah offers in the “Texture Map” node!
… Now you have given me an idea - feathers… hm - I have to investigate that
Another thing I would love to have for stuff like dragon scales would be “directional displacement”. It isn’t possible currently but I have high hopes for pmG including that soon.
Sbowling:
Thank you very much, your feedback is very encouraging! :bounce:
You are right, “easy” is as always relative in this area. I am currently in a flow where every tool inspires another and I start to understand the SDK and vectors and matrices deeper and deeper every day.
(and my 15 years of CG work also help in knowing what’s possible and how things (should) work )
The messiah SDK is very good in all areas that are available and explained while other stuff is simply impossible or you don’t know that an option is there because there is no documentation on that particular thing and you only have some function declarations in the headers.
But I’m crunching through it…
Labuzz:
With my TLHPro:Distance shader you can make any object into a “local ambient light” with lots of control. That should do almost everything those max tools do if I understand them correctly. The following image is an example room without any light or GI and just a Null object under the ceiling that is the center of my TLH:Distance shader. Rendertime = 8 seconds:
Now combine that with your normal shading for shadows etc…
Since messiah materials don’t have explicit ambient settings and I can’t create light sources with the SDK anyway, the above is the way to do it for the moment as far as I can see.
Suricate:
Yes, I think non-organics and patterns will be definitely the area to add to AoN. I already have some interesting ideas for that, like fractalization and randomization for such patterns, so you can layer several sizes/colors etc. of such stuff on top of each other to get more complex looking structures.
Anisotropics? Hmmm… maybe just hold on for a little more time (I have said nothing, haven’t I )
Thank you all for your feedback!
The next shader I want to show you is TLHPro:EasyMath.
In the first version of “Tommys little Helpers” I had a separate node for each math operator. While this can be okay and even some high end render systems treat it that way, I soon found it annoying to have 3-5 nodes for even simple tasks, since most of the time I want to do more than just add or multiply a value.
My approach to the problem is the following interface:
The Main Value is what will get crunched by the math operators below. It can be a fixed or animated value or (more useful) a value delivered in the Main Value input.
Then you can select from the dropdowns what to do with this input. If the value needs an operand, like multiply, you can set this in the second column. The values in this column have also inputs, so they can not only be static but can use input from other shaders as well!
Since some operators only work with certain value ranges (f.i. the Squareroot of a negative number is illegal), this it set internally without the user having to care about.
Here is the list of the available operators:
If you think there is something missing (other than “Add” which is cut of in the screenshot), please tell me about it, I will be happy to add it if it makes sense to me.
Currently, TLHPro:EasyMath works on single floating point values. Now I am a bit unsure if a color version would be useful? A lot of the operators could be a bit weird to handle if all three color values are handled the same. What do you think from your practice?
Edit: The result of the above interface settings looks like the following image when applied to the same scene as the local ambient example in the post above. The distance is fed into the Main Value input, it is multiplied by ten, then the sine of the result is taken, a value of one is added to make it all positive and then it is multiplied by one half to get it back into the zero to one range:
Cheers, :bowdown:
Wow Thomas!
This is amazing stuff you are adding to messiah! Those lurvely blending modes are going to be so usefull… There have been so many times when I whished I could use photoshop like blending modes… same goes for all the other components you are developing…
You are definetely on the same wavelength as the users. This is yet another example (the other being Taron) of how invaluable (and very fortunate) it is to have production experience when developing software
Thanks Thomas!! :)
How bout a Dirt/Accesibility shader? Ok, maybe I’m pushing my luck here
SergSergO:
Thank you very much
Don’t fear: I am looking into an occlusion shader already but this is a bit more work.
Julez4001:
As I said above, no price decision is made yet, since I’m still adding stuff.
Cheers!