TLHPro - WIP Thread

#101

Goethe wasn’t using C - this is unfair. I can do rhymes just fine in german but in C it is much harder LOL

Cheers!

#102

Is glow (like in maya and lw) possible under the shaderflow is that purely image filter?

#103

Oh c’mon, are you saying that you can do rhymes just like Goethe…?? :wink:

#104

Julez: Sorry, I missed your question: Normally it is an imagefilter like in LW (rendered after the main render). There are ways to do it with volumetrics too, but the SDK/messiah is still missing that part AFAIK.
But since the imagefilter is also node based, I think it should become very cool and flexible.

maks: I do goethe for breakfast, try me :wink:

Sorry for the delay with updating this thread, I encounter a lot of problems with the SDK currently and don’t have much new stuff to show yet. :banghead:

Cheers!

#105

Thomas_Helzle, I just got a $100 bonus for Christmas and I was wondering what I could spend it on. I just got a great deal on messiah:Studio 2 from someone and I was thinking, “Hmm…AoN is only 104 in USD…that seems like a perfect match!” All of the examples have been pretty mind-blowing so how can I resist?

I noticed earlier in this thread that there might be a bundle for AoN and TLHPro, or maybe a reduced rate for existing AoN users so what would you recommend I do? Should I go ahead and get AoN now or wait for the bundle? :wise:

#106

Leebert:
That is a very good question and I know I was a little bit unclear in that regard. It is always hard to decide about the price while you still add features. :slight_smile: It was only yesterday that I started to work on two more cool tools for TLHPro. But I think a clear statement is needed to help users decide about this, so here it is:
The Bundle will have the same price reduction that the existing AoN:Users will get when they buy TLHPro.
So you are welcome to buy AoN now and get the same “relative price” for TLHPro later that you would get with the bundle. Since TLHPro may take quite some time to get finished (I didn’t even start the docs) you can start working with AoN already.

The only unknown factor is the dollar course (or is it the dollar curse? :wink: ) that may go in either direction.

I hope this helps. If anybody has questions on this, please don’t hesitate to ask! Money should always be handled as clear as possible IMO.

Cool that you like the shaders! :bowdown:

Best regards,

#107

Thomas,

Would you consider selling TLHPro early without the finished doc. So for those who would like to get it early and start using it and not wait for the doc to be finished.

Cheers,

#108

tjnyc:
Hmm… (scratching his head)
I would have to think about that…
I use the doc-writing phase for intensive testing and found lot’s of little bugs while writing the ones for AoN:Studio. Also, I changed some basic stuff completely that I found to be non-optimal after longer use. This would be rather tedious for the user (f.i. I had to redo about 100 of the 400 presets from scratch after one of the changes :sad: ).

If there is a lot of interest in such an “early access” option, I would consider it.
But it would be a complete: “Use it on your own risk” deal.
I normally don’t like to release potentially broken stuff :wink:

Cheers!

#109

In that case, that would be a different scenario.

Cheers,

#110

Huh? What do you mean?
Was this a “yes, release it as soon as possible” or a “no, I don’t want premature software” vote? :slight_smile:

Cheers!

#111

Release when it is ready. I don’t think anyone likes a potentially shaky product, better to wait for a solid one.

Cheers,

#112

Finally, with the help of Taron and Lyle with some problems in the SDK, I was able to finish two plugins in one day. Since it is early in the morning now in germany, I will just post one first experiment with TLHPro:Easy Glass, more on this will come tomorrow:

I always hated the “Lightwave” way of doing glass. Copying the object, invert the normals and make an air surface for it felt to me like 1985 technique :wink:
In messiah, where the same kind of object is needed I also had problems with radiosity if the inner object wasn’t slightly smaller than the outer - you can get splotchy renders then because of the rounding errors in depth calculations…
So I wrote a plugin that just removes that pain: Use any object, turn it to doublesided and attach TLHPro:Easy Glass to your main material and off you go…
The above example is just my good old test object, two spotlights and an HDRI map in the background (which uses also TLHPro:RayType to switch between camera and reflection/transparency rays).
The rendering is almost pure, just a halo has been added and some correction to the background was made. The HDRI brightness gives the AA a hard time again, so I smoothed some edges by hand.

Cheers!

Thomas Helzle

#113

Man, that looks fantastic! Way to go!

Cheers,

#114

You just solved a major messiah problem, I hope your help is propogated in messiah soon.

Was halo added via messiah or ps?

That whole imagefilter thing from early got me curious.

#115

Thanks guys :slight_smile:

This is just a relatively wild example on a hard to recognize object - I will do a more “classic” scene next.

Julez:
Thank you. I never did glass in messiah because of those problems… It never looked right.
I have just played with imagefilters a bit, but haven’t produced anything useful yet.
So this is still Photoshop post.

Currently, TLHPro:Easy Glass provides just one output for refraction.
I think I will make two more outputs with separate values for reflective- and transparency-fresnel.
The fresnel in messiah always gave me weird, non understandable results so far so this should be helpful too.
The above image still uses two gradients for that.
If I include it in Easy Glass, the name should be even more valid :slight_smile:

Cheers!

#116

dunno how glass works in lightwave or messiah but sounds a bit painful…anyway i love that result…looks superb…nice job.
:thumbsup:

#117

flingster:
Yes, when I came from Cinema 4D years ago to LW, I just couldn’t believe it. And while I found some cases where it is actually a good thing, most of the time it’s rather annoying :slight_smile:

OK, todays image is done with TLHPro:EasyGlass again, and uses the same environment as the “weird thing” above. But to make it easier to recognize, I made a glass table and a carafe :slight_smile:
The rendertimes with such “deep” scenes (RayDepth 10 this time) are rather high (sorry, forgot to look fast enough at the commandline - but about 2 hours I guess), which thankfully has little to do with my plugin, but more with the computational intensive nature of such a scene where each rayhit spawns a reflected ray as well as one that goes further into the glass.
The only renderer I know who cuts through such scenes like a hot knife through butter is still Fprime. Hopefully the “glass department” of messiah can be optimized in later patches a bit:

Two spotlights with soft raytraced shadows, “Transmissive Shadows” on all objects, AA 3, Enhanced, RG, 1.5. No GI.

I will try to do another perspective of the scene later.
BTW. The weird stuff visible through the table top are the glass legs… :wink:

Cheers!

#118

The second new plugin I want to show today is TLHPro: Doublesider.
Again, it is a rather simplistic principle, but extremely powerful in practice:
You all may know the situation when you have just plain polygons without any depth but need to texturize the front different from the back. Bookpages, labels, playing cards, cloth… you name it. TLHPro: Doublesider switches between two different textures depending on the current ray hitting a front or a backside.
The following picture shows an object that is one wavy splinecurve extruded along another, rather randomized splinecurve in XSI. The rail has no thickness, so I couldn’t have different front and backsides normally. But with DoubleSider, I was able to have one side textured with my procedural AoN:Grid-Lines(1D) in red and yellow and the other with an AoN:Grid-Checkerboard in plain black and white - both use the same UVmap:

The scene uses no lightsources, just the rail itself is emitting light.
BTW. : A rather neat trick for this situation is, to use a very low Luminosity to prevent the object getting completely flat but raise the Emission value rather high. I used 0.01 for Luminosity and 200 for Emission here.
Other than that, the settings were my usual AA Enhanced Level 2, Threshold 0.015, RG, 1.5. Depth of Field “Interpolated” (looks very nice if the blur isn’t too large) and Monte Carlo with 3 GI Samples, GI Depth 2, GI Noise Reduction with 250000 Photons, GI Gather Radius 0.25, Gather Count 1000 and Tolerance 1.0.
There was no post this time - pure render from messiah. It took 12:05 minutes.

I hope you like it :bounce:

Cheers! :bowdown:

#119

TWO Thumbs up!
Very nicely done.
The glass table is very nice and I know that Gary will lie oncehe gets back in town.
The doubleside emission emitting strand is a great plugin feature. You are outdoing yourself thats for sure.

#120

Wowser! Thomas, you continue to amaze me with your constant improvements in your shaders. Glass was one of messiah’s weaknesses - but by the looks of it, you’ve laid that to rest. :bounce:

Julez4001: I’m leaving tomorrow (Sat) … so, I’m still here for a little while longer. We’ll have to hook up again real soon. :slight_smile: