TLHPro - WIP Thread

#141

My first attempt at writing a shader was in BMRT, but my second was in Cinema v6. :slight_smile:

I didn’t realize that you’d been a Cinema user at all, to be honest; I was just comparing your work
to the Smells Like Almonds stuff from Bhodinut, because they were extremely powerful shaders,
the likes of which were totally new to Cinema at the time.

This is why I plan to concentrate on XSI development after TLHPro is finished.

I don’t intend to abandon messiah though, just move the main focus to a more integrated and complete/mature app. My plan is to develop new stuff for XSI and then see what can be ported back to messiah. The internal structure of shaders for instance is very similar, so AoN:XSI is already in the works… :slight_smile:

Cool – I’m getting more and more interested in XSI every day. I’m looking forward to unpacking my
desktop so that I can start using it again; it’s pretty unstable on my laptop, because of the graphics
card and drivers. :frowning:

But AoN for XSI would be very cool :smiley:

#142

Yes, when I first saw SLA, I was totally stunned. The anisotropic metal shader still is one of the best available I think and some of the others are also superb.
Cool if my stuff reminds you of Bhodinuts work - I am really feeling honored :bounce: :bowdown:

Have you updated your XSI to 4.2? I had very unstable results with 4.0, but 4.2 has resolved all of the former issues and I can use it with the latest Nvidia drivers that crashed XSI before on startup. Very good job from Softimage - and free, even for Foundation users.

Best regards :slight_smile:

#143

muuuuahhaah … that look too cool … that would perfectly fit to the kind of look i am developing now for my japanese pilote ( see signature )

tommy you are a friiging genius !!!

#144

It was intended as a compliment when I mentioned it :slight_smile:

[/quote]Have you updated your XSI to 4.2? I had very unstable results with 4.0, but 4.2 has resolved all of the former issues and I can use it with the latest Nvidia drivers that crashed XSI before on startup. Very good job from Softimage - and free, even for Foundation users.
[/QUOTE]
I did download it and install it on my laptop, but my desktop (which has a much better
graphics card) was already packed up to facilitate a renovation in my house (I’m selling,
buying, and moving shortly). I’m working on a matte painting in Cinema4D right now, but
I’m looking forward to getting back to XSI, so I’ll probably try it out to see how well it
works on my laptop. In fact, now that you mention it, I might try the matte painting in it.
The only thing I don’t have in there is an efficient way to create foliage, while I do have
the Nature Spirit plugin for Cinema.

#145

Finally, after some weeks, I was able to get help from Lyle and he showed me a temporary workaround for a very bad memory leak in the SDKs raytrace and raycast functions that didn’t allow me to render a full animation. (be careful if you try to use those, the fxRayHitDelete doesn’t work most of the time, so old rays eat up memory like crazy)
Again, I used good ole Butch for this :wink:

And the animation: Tarons Butch with TLHPro:Occlusion in NPR-mode
This is a Quicktime that uses On2 3.2 - the only codec I was able to find that handles the lines and colors without problems - all others introduced slimy moving noise or other weirdness :wink: I think you should be able to get the coded with the quicktime update function…

Yes, it still has only one line direction, I couldn’t develop that part much since the last posts because of the SDK bugs (I wrote on the docs instead). I become more and more interested in the NPR possibilities though, so you can be sure that I will further investigate this.

For the animation, I took the cellshaded Butch you may already know but with a special “Butch-holder-wall” behind him :wink: Then I used a TLHPro:Merger node to combine the TLHPro:Occlusion shader on top of the cellshaded result. The Merger had the “Overlay” Function (you know that from Photshop) selected so the basically black and white Occlusion result merged in quite nicely.
I am very happy with the result, my only problem is, that the adaptive AA has a hard time with all those contrasted lines, so rendertime per Frame was 7 minutes…a bit much IMO. But if you think that the lines are calculated by a process that is basically Monte Carlo Radiosity with 25 rays per evaluation and therefore gives very natural results, it isn’t too bad either…

The next steps will be looking into line-direction-variation techniques…

Another fascinating thing is how good the result from only one ray looks:

Sure it is pretty rough, but since it is completely stable through Animation, it is a very interesting style I think, and rendertime is 1:05 minutes for this size!

I hope you like it :slight_smile:

Best regards! :bowdown:

#146

Wow! Everything is looking great! Can’t wait for this release. I hope you can get multi direction going, a nice cross-hatching effect would be awesome.

Cheers,

#147

Hm - I fear that multidirection is a problem, but you can always use two nodes with different directions and overlay them - Since you then need less rays for each, it wouldn’t even be so bad regarding rendertimes…

Cheers!

#148

You are right, most likely I would choose to just composite it later on to make a nice cross-hatching.
Is there a way to set the direction in XY and Z? It seems from your samples that they only go in the XY direction.

Could we control the direction using a Raydistance with two nulls? Could we possibly also use a spline curve to transform the shape into curving lines?

I would like to try is use it to get manga style speed lines for animation.

Cheers,

#149

heheheh - I knew this question would come up again although I tried to answer it in the above post already :wink:
I don’t think splines will be possible, but I investigate other options.
Currently the direction is hardcoded, but basically it can be driven by everything.

Speed lines? I don’t think that will be an option since this is basically a motion thing. And getting just lines can be achieved much easier/faster (with a stretched AoN:Noise for instance)?
But I am not sure I get the picture you have in mind so if you have a link to something that looks like what you want, I can give a better answer… :slight_smile:

Cheers!

#150

No that is fine. I was just curious, I can do speed lines fine enough in Expressions and flash, just haven’t found an NPR that could do it.

Cheers,

#151

tony…is this not possible in Sketch and Toon? if not bang an email off to maxon…and obeardy is sure to have it in there next version if possible in maxons setup…the word perfectionist springs to mind.
just a thought…hope you don’t mind hijack Thomas…sorry.
:shrug:

#152

hehehe - no problem. I don’t intend to do something like Sketch and Toon.
I’m currently experimenting with more options for the this NPR-like radiosity (you can change the line direction already with external inputs) and I think it will become a lot of fun, but still it is one of the many tools and not a full solution.

But if I will ever find the time to do some image filters, the speedlines could be an interesting idea as soon as messiah has motion vector buffers…

Cheers! :bowdown:

#153

While finishing the shaders and writing the docs, I don’t have as much updates for you as usual. But I want to share this image with you:

It is a test with the NPR mode of the ambient occlusion shader. As you can see, I have implemented inputs for line direction, but still I’m not completely satisfied with it, it needs too much fumbling around to get the line widths right. I haven’t found natural looking line distortion functions yet either, that don’t get rather “psychedelic” :wink:

The image is an early test for illustrations for a children’s book I’m writing. The background is a scanned in paper texture from a 100 year old book, the lines are added in Photoshop (I have one design concept where the pages of the book all have that as a texture and the text flows along the lines, a bit like an exercise book in school). In messiah, the texture is frontprojected on the background as well as on the ground with no diffuse but 100% luminosity. On Tompa, the pony, and his stable, the same texture is used, but without the lines. Then the TLHPro: Occlusion shader is multiplied on top of that, so all the shading is done by it, there is no lights in the scene or any GI going on.
First I thought the very straight lines are too hard, but the longer I look at it, the more I like it. One of my next experiments will be an UV-mapped object where the lines follow the U and V directions… Maybe this could be the best way of defining the outcome.

Cheers!

#154

Hey Thomas,

What’s the latest status on your plug-in?

R

#155

That is a good question. :wink:

I had some serious issues with bugs in the SDK and problems with UV-code for my Wireframe Shader that I got from pmG. Both took a lot of time and energy out of the flow. :banghead:
Now last week, Fori was finally able to provide me with a solution for the Wireframe/UV problem and the RayCast bugs should be fixed in the next patch.

Since all this took serious amounts of time and energy, I had to concentrate on other work to make some money in the meantime.

I will have to continue earning my living so I am unable to give you a date for the release of the plugins. Messiah development is slow and the deeper I enter the SDK the more I am dependent on pmG which makes me slow too.

Sorry to not have better news for you.

Cheers!

#156

Thanks for the update

#157

Today I want to show a rendering I made with the now finally working relative-thickness mode of TLHPro Wireframe with bump mapping. The model is Christophe Desses famous “Lapin Rose Decadant”:

This rendering uses the “Triangles” mode where all polys are rendered as triangles although most of them are quads originally. There also is a “Quads” mode, where the shader tries to render everything as quads (which looks much cleaner).
The model uses MetaNurbs with 6 subdivisions but only the main polygons are rendered on the smoothed mesh.

Cheers,

#158

Wow, cooooooool! :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup: Reminds me a bit of Meats Meier’s wire creatures :slight_smile:

#159

yeahh cool…

exactly same felling there , remember me of Meats Meier’s work

#160

Thank you! :slight_smile:

Yeah, it seems Meats Meier has made wireframes and complexity his “brand”.
I have to admit that I found the first 10 images I saw from him amazing, but now the fascination wears off.
I miss artistic meaning in his work beyond technical skill and “lots of stuff”.
For my taste it is too “cold” - I need more emotion. :wink:

Anyway, this image should be far enough away from his style:

Same object from Christophe Desse aka xtrm3d but now with a blueish bumped wireframe in “Quad”-mode on top of a translucent pink.
This way, it has more of a “Spiderrabbit” look to it… :wink:

Cheers,