TLHPro - WIP Thread

#161

Glad to hear you got the fixes in. Looking great as always, very eager to try out these shader plugins.

Cheers,

#162

I just wanted to make a statement about the state of my TLHPro shaders since I get questions every now and then:

I currently work on porting my AoN:studio shaders to XSI/Mental Ray.
This takes all the spare time I have for coding.
I haven’t used messiahs renderer for any commercial work myself yet and it is my impression that almost nobody does so.
Therefore, the render-userbase is extremely small.
The historic reasons for that are well known, so I will not go into it here.

I may continue working on the shaders when an improved messiah version comes out that has better, more reliable SDK documentation, fully working network rendering and a more complete renderer so it becomes usable for more people/studios.
Also, I bought the update to studio from the lightwave plugin in 2002 mostly because of messiah:develop which still isn’t available. While I know the reasons, that doesn’t help me in the end, when I have to do the work it is supposed to do by hand.

An accumulation of such problems over the years has brought me to a point while developing TLHPro when I suddenly asked myself: “What the f**k am I doing here.”
It was after it took me something like 2 or 3 months to find out how to extract working, continuous UV info with the SDK.
While the users here on CGtalk were the most fantastic crowd and gave me wonderful support and encouragement, the people at pmG have so much to do that they are hardly able to support others.

My personal view on this is well known from some rants on this forum. I think when you write the best software in the world and fail to empower people to really use it, you simply missed the point. There is a balance between coding and explaining what you did and how to use it to your users. And that is more important than pmG seems to realize.

As far as AoN:studio goes: I already made some improvements to the shaders while porting them to XSI (more options, some new modes) and these changes will eventually make it back to messiah at a later time, but I can’t even guarantee that much without any clue what’s going on with messiah.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I had to move on.

Cheers and thank you all! :bowdown:

#163

will you make the shaders XSI that can be rendered with mental ray or will you make them Mental ray shaders that can be used with Maya and max.

about the Messiah shaders are they completed, what and how much work díd do on them… how far are them from completion…

Blood_boy

#164

His AON shaders are already available and they are very nice (and very affordable): AON Shaders

#165

I have never touched Max and Maya seriously so I have no idea how much different their MR shaders are, I would guess that it is more or less a different interface file, but I doubt I will port the shaders, simply since I don’t own those apps and therefore I can neither test them nor write appropriate docs.

TLHPro is mostly finished as far as my internal use goes, I worked several months on them, but for a release I would need 1 or 2 months for docs and finishing and I decided against that because of the reasons given above.

AoN:studio is working perfectly in messiah. At least I had no error reports yet.

Cheers,

#166

BUMP!

GIMMIE!

Any chance of seeing some of the images that aren’t linked anymore?

#167

Thomas,

Same price as AON. Most defintely ready to pay :-).

Ikem

#168

Nichod: are there still any images missing? CGtalk shows no error in the postings for missing images, so I may have overlooked something. The one thing I haven’t found on my harddisk is one of the “Butch” Videos…

Thank you for pointing this out - I used a different server for those that I no longer have!

okafor: cool, I think I will do it that way.

:bowdown:

#169

Nichod: are there still any images missing? CGtalk shows no error in the postings for missing images, so I may have overlooked something. The one thing I haven’t found on my harddisk is one of the “Butch” Videos…

I’m still seeing a few. Page 6 is missing quite a few. Any chance of seeing some node visuals of how some of these setups work?

#170

Hm, how many postings do you have per page? I have 20 and neither on page 6 nor on page 3 I can find missing images - did you refresh your browser?
Or could you be so nice to provide direct links to the missing-images postings?

Sorry for the inconvenience - this thread is really old :wink:

Cheers,

#171

Its post #80. Black and white images.

See: (And yes I refreshed and cleaned cache)

Now I just can’t stop rendering with the UV feature and I thought you guys may love it too, so here goes some massive image post:

To help you guys with the more black and white oriented mind (just joking :slight_smile: ) I made up some simpler renderings that show the effect rather pure.
This is just the Isoparms/Cage mesh wireframe rendered on top of slightly randomized polys. Linewidth here is UV-based so bigger Polys have thicker lines. Slight linesmoothing is used:

This one reminds me a bit of some tin toys. Again, it is the main polys only, but this time the Lines are 1.) colored with a gradient from black to yellow to transparent. 2.) Linethickness is modulated by an AoN:Turbulence node. The amount and look of the effect can be varied by using different shaders and it even looks cool with much larger settings… :

All of the following images use no wire or dots, but just the UV-mapping feature. This first one uses a rough drawn image frame as a “wireframe”. Paint your own wires and just slap it on :slight_smile: :

Here I was browsing my harddrive for tileable stuff, and I like the look of these Bathtiles:

For all the spacecraft addicts - I actually found a “plates” texture that I have downloaded somewhere. It doesn’t tile too good, but you should get the idea. To prevent stretching, you would have to invest more time in planing your model than I did:

… continue to the next post…

By the way nodes?

#172

Great news! Tky Thomas!
Cant wait to sign!

#173

OK, I fixed that post - if anything else is missing, please report it.

About the nodes: the setups are mostly extremely simple with maybe an average of 5 nodes, sometimes maybe 8… What setups would be interesting to you?

AND PLEASE REMEMBER: Ambient Occlusion and Wireframe are NOT included with the initial release! Since there are many renderings from those two shaders in this thread, I don’t want people to be frustrated when they realise that those two are missing!

Best regards,

#174

Really any. The glass examples would be nice.

#175

Well, you may find the shadertree a bit disappointing - it actually IS EasyGlass :wink:

This is the glass of the carafe in this post:


The table is basically the same material.
Most of the effect comes from a HDRI image (good old “Building Probe”) on the environment.

I started today from scratch with the docs. I will make them as a PDF first with AoN-like docs coming later.
If everything goes well, I will release by the end of the week with those early docs.

Cheers,

#176

Ok, another update:
I already have written 7 A4 pages of the documentation with images today, the first 3 shaders are covered.
If I can keep this stride, end of the week should be possible.
Let’s see how my customers give me time to breathe - this year started rather nice so far :slight_smile:

I think I like the PDF format, maybe I can create the final, extended docs as windows help file as well as as a PDF for better printing… ? What do you think?

It is funny to work in messiah again after a year. Many things are still really nice, especially the great node design, while on the other hand too many small annoyances still exist, like the focus jumping to the next material when deleting shaders etc … :rolleyes:

I will keep you updated with “bloglike” updates on this thread.

Cheers and best regards, :bowdown:

#177

Awesome. There’s several shaders here (double-sided, easy glass, (soon-to-be?) ambient occlusion, distance, thickness, UV tiling… heck almost all of them!) that I’m eager to play with.

Ooh almost forgot the photoshop-style blending modes! :applause: I think you’ll get a lot more than 4 purchases for these.

#178

isobarxx: cool you like the shaders! :bounce:
But please be aware that the UV tiling was done with the Wireframe shader which will not be part of the initial release!
I looked at the code again, and I think I will split that shader into three separate nodes:
one for wires, one for points and one for polygons. I had so many ideas back then, that it became too crowded.
Since the polygon/tiling part is the easiest one and already works as part of that monster shader, it may be not too long until I can deliver it - but no promises yet.

Other than that, I was working on the documentation of the TLHPro: Distance shader today, and realised that I made this node too complicated back then. So I removed 3 controls without reducing functionality (in fact, it is less confusing and more consistent now), added a “Raw Value” output that always delivers the uncomputed distance, and finally I added a “Raylength” feature, that should fit into this node nicely and give your inner nerd something to play with… :wink:

While this slowed me down a bit documentationwise, I think it makes the node much easier to use and powerful - and I found some documentation I started 2004 that should help keeping my daily page-rate up :slight_smile:
Thanks god I did images and explanations for all the 26 layer modes of the TLHPro:Merger back then - I remember going halfways crazy with finding explanations for this stuff :argh:

OK, back to InDesign :wink:

Cheers!

#179

Another day of wonder and fascinating events…

First I finished the TLHPro: Distance shader and the docs for it with many images to make it easier to digest. And I added a way to create DOF Passes like this one:

I finally upgraded my old InDesign 1.5 to CS 2 to be able to see spell checking while I am writing and some other goodies. I just love this software :slight_smile:

Then I did the docs for TLHPro: Doublesider, but I suddenly got only crashes from the plugin and couldn’t load old scenes with it. I still don’t understand why this happens, but somehow the fxShaderConnectedInputs() function gives me trouble when I use it with a variable from my shader data instead of a normal variable. Since this worked before, I guess something has changed in the SDK? Well, I got it working in the end, but I would prefer to understand what is going on…

BTW. I noticed that now we have a second variable in the SDK to determine if the current ray hits a front or a back facing polygon: “hit_backDS”, but it doesn’t do anything here - same as “hit_back”.
Well, my own function may be a bit slower but at least it works. :slight_smile:

Since EasyGlas is similar, I got the same crash and the same workaround did help. Hopefully I will dig through this tonight with no more problems raising their head…

I think you will like the docs :slight_smile:

Cheers,

#180

give me:bounce:

Allready have a bunch of ideas to test your shaders with as soon as I get my hands on them, can´t wait. Keep up the good work!