EI Technology Group Forums

Sleek car metal look

2008-08-26T00:57:55-06:00

Hi all… Sorry for double-posting, I posted this in the shaders forum by mistake.

Anyone good at reverse-engineering renders?

I have to do a car anim for an event, and am aiming for something along the lines of the enamel, metal flake look (pictured). wondering if anyone has any tips, short of getting mforge (which sounds pretty complex for a short-deadline job, please correct me if I’m wrong). As its animating it needs to be sizzle-free too. Jens Moller has some nice renders in the GI seg of the gallery with a similar texture.... Jens if you’re out there, any pointers??

Also this render has a nice sharp highlight which you wouldn’t get without using an extremely high-res hdri file for the reflection - I’m guessing its a plane or something used as a reflection object - but if so how would you get the hdri-style 100% white highlight? Even with a 100% luminant white plane my test render comes out with a grey highlight… would making it a lightplane help?

Many thanks for any advice!

Rory

Hardware Key Error: Key not plugged in #3

2008-05-29T06:54:28-06:00

Mac PowerBook running OS X 10.5.x
2GB ram
Just installed 7.0 and 7.1
neither run past the Hardware key error: not plugged in #3.
Dongle light is on.
Deadline approaching

OUR miracle BORN 8-18-08 at 10:07 pm in Beverly Hills Ca Kathyrn Hope Novasic

2008-08-20T15:56:48-06:00

Ill get her on EI asap . This community and EI mean so much to me that I wanted to post this here. (she came 9 days early, but all is great! Healthy and happy. We are on cloud 9, 4 years of fertility attempts to have a child all over the country
at 43yrs old, our last attempt (insurance) came through for us and now we are first time parents at 41 & 43yrs old.

Master Light not re-sizing projection image… any suggestions?

2008-08-19T18:21:19-06:00

It seems master lights will not project an image correctly if the spotlight angle is set to anything but the 45˚ , the default. The image stays proportionally the same size and the light around it either gets smaller or larger. I’ve attached an image of the behavior. The top three light projections are unslaved lights, and you can see even changing the cone size the image sticks to the outer cone (default). The bottom three are slaved to a master. At 45˚ they appear correctly, but small as shown the image is cropped.

I’ve posted the project file here http://www.blackboxdesign.com/EIAS/masterlight.zip

Is there a way to get this to work? I’m trying to make a whole bunch of down lights look more realistic, and I need the flexibility to adjust their light cone angle.

Thanks,
Yon

UV hell

2008-06-16T11:42:13-06:00

I have been wrecking my brain over this one for a few day now and I am just not getting anywhere.. This is my first attempt at importing an obj. model with UV maps. I normally import with OBJ2FACT (v2.1), and I understand this is the way to do it whit UVs. I make sure EI is using UVs, then import the new FACT with UVs into EI (v7 on MacIntel). The geo and textures import but fail to show or render. I get solid colors or just plain black. I can see the textures in the individual groups, re-import them, but they won’t even show in the preview window. I tried other pictures, jpeg, img and it works. I converted the images to no avail.

Obviously I flipped the normals on the geometry… I normally model with SILO. I can import my model (it is a commercial model) in SILO where I can see the textures. But re-saving the model leads to the same result, black… I never had success with the export to FAC, so I do the OBJ route through OBJ2FACT, same thing.

I have already built my environment and got it approved by the client, so I am reluctant to move the project to Maya or Houdini, (the other programe we use at our studio), I would like to stick to EI for this one. I did find very little relevant info on line, not much either on Silo’s web site about exporting models with UV maps and textures. Anyone has an idea of where to look for info or what may be the problem. I know there are so many variables, but it must be something simple that I overlooked, even though, I feel like I have turned all the stones.

Christian

Skinning workflow question / possible bug report

2008-08-16T07:15:20-06:00

Hello

1. Is there a simple way to replace a painted strength map for many bones by a new map? If not, there should be.

Now I have to Duplicate Paint the old map, Select Bones for the original map, Remove the original map, and Attach Bones to the replacement map. Is there a better workflow?

2. Another glitch: The Skin Editor values (Weight Min, Falloff, Bone Max) are lost when I detach a skin. So I have to enter the same values again and again when I detach/bind the same skin—really annoying. The skin should retain these values.

3. On the other hand, the strength maps survive when I detach a skin. The bones of the detached skin retain their map reference, which now points to a map on an unbound skin. This state seems to make Animator unstable. I get a lot of crashes in this situation, whenever I rename any object in the scene. The crash is always caused by
DFWDialogEffector::InterfaceBoneStrengthListRename().
The same operation usually works when I restart Animator.

Animator 7, OSX 10.4.11, iMac G5.

APass

2008-04-08T03:59:42-06:00

Just a quicky, there’s me with a fully textured up building wanting to do a GI’d white model render for assessment purposes (ie the purity of 3D form as a white model). So in the past I’d set a material up to b e pure white and link all the objects to it and render. This of course gets rid of any pre-linked textures.

I see Apass arrive on the scene and think - aha - I could use that to do the same thing but without killing my texture links.

But I can’t get it to work in the way I think it should. As I understand you use it as a projection map in the camera of your choice set it to apply to all (luminance channel default) and hey presto.

But I’m not getting the ‘hey presto’ bit.

I’m using 7.0.1 and the shader says it works in 6.5 - am I being dull in not doing this a different way in 7.0.1 ?

Head hurts this morning otherwise I’d spend a bit trying to work it out myself.

Appreciate any thoughts.

James

bones not drawing right

2008-08-16T16:03:10-06:00

this is weird, when i go to draw some bones to a project, they just draw as a single line. when you click there’s no crosshair or anything…

tried an empty project, looked through the preferences, restarted, nothing works…

anyone know what is causing this and the solution?

thanks…

Camera mapping issues.

2008-04-15T10:21:47-06:00

I’ve been having a discussion over at cgsociety about some camera mapping wierdness that I’m experiencing. Basically applying a map to the luminance channel only causes the object to render black and white, apply both luminance and diffuse causes some kind of wierd gamma issue. Same symptoms in v7 and v6.5. The thread on cgsociety with examples can be found here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=186&t=609137

Matt, can you shed some light on what might be going on?

Thanks,

Notes on Renderama 7.0.1

2008-03-03T02:41:21-06:00

Hi all,

I just wanted to share a few temporary fixes for some regular crashes several of us have been experiencing.

Crash 1:
RAYT errors in Camera, however if you launch the exact same render again, it works. This error appears if you have RAM in Camera set very high.
Solution: Lower the RAM allocation to Camera to 1750MB.

Crash 2:
Camera unexpectedly quitting. Camera will quit and the crash report lists the thread that crashed it as ‘com.apple.QD’ (Apple quickdraw). This occurs only on very long renders (45mins plus).
Solution: Close the Camera window when Camera opens.

Crash 3:
Renderama not connecting consistently with slaves.
Solution: Turn off the Apple Firewall (in System Prefs) on ALL machines.

Crash 4:
Camera does not always launch when it receives a .ccn (via Renderama).
Solution 1: Restart
Solution 2: Manually start the Camera app in the slave, it will then work perfectly for the duration of the job.

Hope this helps someone,
Ian